Leadership Quarterly最新文献

We integrate a person-role fit perspective with recent research on executive personality to explain how and when personality traits reflecting CEOs’ and CFOs’ potential complementary roles as the firm’s visionary leader (extraversion) and corporate conscience (conscientiousness) interact to influence financial leverage. Using a sample of more than 3000 CEO-CFO dyads of S&P 1500 firms from 1997 to 2017, we show that firms with more (less) extraverted CEOs tend to have higher (lower) levels of financial leverage, but that greater CFO conscientiousness buffers this relationship by encouraging more moderate levels of financial leverage at either level of CEO extraversion. We also find that this interaction is less pronounced when the CEO has greater structural power, but more pronounced when the CFO has greater structural power. Our theory and findings extend leadership research by enhancing our understanding of the roles of personality and power in collective leadership settings, and particularly, in encouraging outcomes that better reflect complementarity in the CEO-CFO interface.

Gender diversity on corporate boards continues to present a significant challenge, exacerbated by significant external disruptions such as financial crises or the recent COVID-19 pandemic. These exogenous shocks pressure organizations to reconcile diversity imperatives with more immediate concerns arising from the crises at hand. Employing elements from gender role and institutional theories, we argue that major exogenous shocks will negatively affect (i.e., reduce) gender diversity in corporate boards. Moreover, we propose that female CEOs and the strength of institutional mechanisms (i.e., quotas and corporate governance codes) will moderate (i.e., weaken) the negative effect of these shocks on board gender diversity. We examine these hypotheses in the context of the last global financial crisis (GFC), employing a panel of 10,181 unique firms across 21 countries between 2000 and 2015. We apply a two-way fixed effect difference-in-difference research design, complemented by an extensive battery of additional analyses to ensure robustness. Our results confirm a substantial decline in board gender diversity following the GFC. However, we do not find empirical support for female CEOs or institutional mechanisms in mitigating these diversity reductions. Following these findings, we propose several implications for research and policy.

Cultural and evolutionary explanations are often seen as rivals in the social sciences. It is therefore not surprising that these perspectives have also communicated little in leadership research so far. Yet, these two fields have many overlooked complementarities, which can be appreciated when examining the role of ecological factors in shaping variations in cultural leadership prototypes (CLPs) – that is, societally shared ideal attributes and behaviors that followers expect from their leaders. In this paper, we integrate and review multidisciplinary research that clarifies these complementarities. First, we discuss how different CLPs might emerge as responses to the specific threats and opportunities provided by the ecology where human groups live. Second, we review research on the link between CLPs, related cultural patterns, and specific ecological factors, ranging from more physical (e.g., climate, diseases) to more social factors (e.g., population density, warfare). Third, we highlight how CLPs might not only be evoked by current ecological conditions but are also culturally transmitted, resulting in potential mismatches between CLPs and present ecologies. Our review shows that a deeper integration of cultural and evolutionary approaches to leadership is needed to understand why variations in CLPs can emerge, and why they persist or change over time.

Along with the affective revolution in organizational behavior research, leadership research has also experienced an affective revolution, resulting in a field of research on the intersection of affect and leadership. Based on the results of a review of 162 articles published in eight top-tier management and leadership journals over three decades (1990–2022), I identify a range of topics on the intersection of leadership and affect, and organize them under an integrative cognitive-affective-behavioral-trait (CAB-T) thematic framework. Although the field appears to be flourishing, it may have built on a shaky foundation, because most of the published empirical studies are flawed by critical issues such as endogeneity and poor research design. For example, only 12 out of 127 empirical articles are possibly without endogeneity issues; 3 out of 32 experiments and 2 out of 11 qualitative studies are considered rigorous against specified criteria. Based on the identified limitations, I provide a future research agenda for a robust field of leader affect research.

The deep-level characteristics (e.g., personality, ability, values) of leaders have previously been found to influence key outcomes for followers, organizations, and more. However, many widely used measures of these deep-level characteristics (e.g., self-reported Likert scales) cannot be implemented when studying high-ranking leaders due to a lack of direct access to those types of leaders. In light of this challenge, scholars have developed indirect, unobtrusive measures to capture these deep-level characteristics. In this review, we examine the four overarching approaches prior scholars have used to indirectly measure leaders’ deep-level characteristics—language, visual media, financials, and personal factors—and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Based on the patterns found, we also suggest avenues for future research.

In this review, we aim to critically evaluate the state of the leadership and networks literature and provide a detailed overview of the various network-based approaches that can be leveraged in leadership research to accomplish three main objectives. First, we introduce an organizing framework that classifies the array of network-based approaches used in addressing leadership questions into two broad categories: descriptive versus predictive network-based approaches. Second, we critically review the leadership literature to assess the degree to which network-based approaches have been employed in leadership investigations, the major topic areas in leadership that have been investigated via a social network lens, and the extent to which network-based approaches have impacted researchers’ abilities to address major empirical challenges in leadership research—namely, the incorporation of multilevel, multisource, contextual, temporal, processual, and causal perspectives of leadership. Finally, we demonstrate the unique capabilities of the network-based approaches by showing how an exemplar topic in leadership investigations—leadership emergence—may be explored from multiple perspectives through the different categories of network-based models. By promoting a better understanding of network-based methodologies and their utilization in leadership research, we pave way for new ways of thinking about and framing leadership research questions.

Complementary evidence from narrative literature reviews and meta-analyses leads to the conclusion that much research suffers from a lack of attention to the context in which leadership occurs. Several possible reasons for this context deficit are refuted, including notions that context is unimportant for leaders, contextualized research is less scientific than decontextualized research, and useful contextual descriptors are lacking. Rather, it is argued that the context deficit is a negative manifestation of the romance of leadership. Advantages of enhanced attention to context include reduction of omitted variable bias, improved understanding of anomalous research results, differentiation and integration of research findings, and enhanced teaching and practice of leadership. Improved contextual appreciation can be facilitated by consulting contextual success stories, embracing an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on events, behavior, and change, employing experience sampling, conducting more qualitative research, using a configural approach, studying how leaders construe and process contextual cues, adopting context-specific leadership measures, and improving writing, editing, and review practices concerning context.