Leadership Quarterly最新文献

Scholars have investigated the emergence of charismatic leaders in times of crisis. However, results from this research are usually descriptive, suffer from endogeneity bias, or rely on inappropriate causal modeling. Building on exogenous events, we explore the causal effect of crises on charismatic rhetoric and approval ratings of political leaders using regression discontinuity designs. In a reanalysis of Bligh et al. (2004), we find that the rhetoric of President George W. Bush changed after 9/11 to include more references to charismatic themes. We replicate these results using President Francois Hollande reactions to terrorist attacks in 2015 and 2016 (i.e., Charlie Hebdo, Paris, and Nice attacks). Across both studies, we find similar evidence for an upward shift in charismatic rhetoric and approval ratings at the time of crisis. Our findings contribute to the literature on charisma and crisis by showing that the emergence of charisma is not only a follower attributional process but that veritable behavior of leaders can change. Our manuscript also pedagogically re-introduces the regression discontinuity design, a quasi-experimental procedure largely unused in applied leadership and management research.

The article systematically explores exogenous shocks in leadership and management research. It introduces a special issue of The Leadership Quarterly emphasizing how naturally occurring events like financial crises, pandemics, and regulatory changes can be used for empirical research. Then, it reviews various conceptualizations and ways of integrating exogenous shocks into empirical strategies. Finally, it categorizes exogenous shocks based on their extent, timescale, and granularity of intervention, highlighting challenges in causal identification.

Does U.S. governors’ political partisanship matter to their responses to the COVID-19 public health crisis? Drawing from upper echelons theory, we examined whether and when the governors’ political partisanship (Democratic versus Republican) mattered to the time they took to issue stay-at-home orders, which were advocated to be a strong defense to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings based on event history methodology reveal that Democratic governors took about 9 fewer days than Republican governors to issue statewide stay-at-home orders. In addition, governing discretion and governing demands exacerbated the relationship of governors’ political partisanship with the time to their issuance of stay-at-home orders. For instance, when governing discretion was high, Democratic governors took 18 fewer days than Republican governors to issue stay-at-home orders. Moreover, when governing demands were high, Democratic governors took 25 fewer days than Republican governors to declare stay-at-home orders. Our findings are robust to different sets of analyses and a comprehensive set of controls. Moreover, additional analyses suggest that governors' political partisanship was also related to the issuance of reopening plans and that governing discretion and governing demands moderated the relationship. This research provides theoretical and actionable practical implications for various stakeholders in the fight against COVID-19.

By exploiting both the unique institutional setting of the Chinese political system and the quasi-experimental features of a massive nationwide rural rustication movement in China during the 1960–1970s, this paper explores the relationship between leaders’ early-life experiences and their policy preferences. Based on a unique panel data set of 318 regional units from 2003 to 2012, we find that those units are associated with more generous rural welfare programs when governed by zhiqing leaders, who experienced rural rustication during their early adulthood. We further find that this association becomes stronger when leaders spent more time in rustication or rusticated in places that were much worse developmentally than their hometowns. These findings remain consistent after applying various robustness checks and accounting for possible selection biases. We interpret these findings as evidence showing that emotional attachment, cognitive sympathy, deservedness justification and self-efficacy accrued through shared life experiences during the sensitive years of adolescence could have lasting effects in configuring leaders’ late policy preferences when they come into power. Our findings lend support to the argument that a leader’s early-life experience provides useful information to predict this leader’s policy styles.

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.

In March 2020, the COVID-19 virus turned into a pandemic that hit organizations globally. This pandemic qualifies as an exogenous shock. Based on the threat-rigidity hypothesis, we hypothesize that this shock led to an increase in directive leadership behavior. We also argue that this relationship depends on the magnitude of the crisis and on well-learned responses of managers. In our empirical analysis we employ a differences-in-differences design with treatment intensity and focus on the period of the first lockdown, March until June 2020. Using a dataset covering monthly data for almost 27,000 managers across 48 countries and 32 sectors for January 2019 to December 2020, we find support for the threat-rigidity hypothesis. During the first lockdown, directive leadership increased significantly. We also find that this relationship is moderated by COVID-19 deaths per country, the sectoral working from home potential, and the organizational level of management. Our findings provide new evidence how large exogenous shocks like COVID-19 can impact leadership behavior.

Whereas the scarring effects of unemployment on future income, health and well-being are well-documented, little is known about its potential role in future leadership emergence and development. Using data from two cohorts of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY79 and NLSY97) and drawing from life course theory, we examine the role of employment gaps in emerging adulthood on leadership role occupancy in middle adulthood. Based on a combined sample of 9,915 respondents (NLSY79 N = 5,551; NLSY97 N = 4,567), we find strong and robust support for significant scarring effects of early-career unemployment on individuals’ future chances to occupy leadership positions in work settings. We further examine the moderating role of early life disadvantage (operationalized as family socio-economic status and childhood delinquency) and sex. Based on our main and supplementary analyses, we find some but weak support for these interaction effects. Our results based on complete case analyses support the role of early life disadvantage, showing that individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds experience stronger negative effects on leader role occupancy due to employment gaps in emerging adulthood. They further support the moderating role of sex, showing women to experience more adverse effects. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

We use a laboratory experiment to study how leaders affect workers’ productivity across economic incentive contexts. In four-person groups, three group members work on a production task, with a fourth member potentially serving as a leader. We vary the economic context by changing how worker pay is determined as a function of worker outputs, comparing Revenue Sharing, Weak Link or Tournament incentives while holding constant the activity performed by workers and the incentives for leaders. A second treatment varies whether groups have Active Leaders who can exert influence through messages to workers or Passive Supervisors who exert no influence. The average effect of having an Active Leader on group output is large only under Weak Link incentives. Across all incentive contexts, we find a positive correlation between the productivity increase in output produced by an Active Leader and independent ratings of leader quality based on measures from leadership research. The nature of leaders’ communication varies across incentive contexts, with comparisons between workers most common under Tournament incentives and messages about group earnings, which speak to social considerations, most common with Weak Link incentives.

Organizational scholars commonly refer to organizations as complex systems unfolding as a function of work processes. Consequently, the direct study of work processes necessitates our attention. However, organizational scholars tend not to study work processes directly. Instead, organizational scholars commonly develop theories about relationships among psychological construct phenomena that indirectly reference people’s affective, behavioral, cognitive, and/or social processes as underlying explanations. Specifically, construct-oriented theories summarize processes in operation across actors, time, and contexts, and thus, provide limited insights into how focal phenomena manifest directly as a function of process operations. Construct theories remain one-step removed from articulating sequences of actions and two-steps removed from describing generative mechanisms responsible for observed actions. By “missing the action,” construct theories offer incomplete explanatory accounts and imprecise interventions. We assert that researchers in organizational science can make progress towards addressing these concerns by directing greater attention to developing computational process theories. We begin by presenting a framework for differentiating theories based on their focus (constructs versus processes) and modality (narrative versus computational). We use the framework to contrast narrative construct theories to computational process theories. We then describe key design principles for developing computational process theories and explain those principles using a leadership example. We use simulated data, from the computational process model we develop, to explicitly demonstrate the differences between construct and process thinking. We then discuss how computational process theories advance theory development. We conclude with a discussion of the long-term benefits of computational process theories for organizational science.

Executive succession in conjunction with a gender shift is a key factor for enhancing gender diversity in senior management positions. Although an extensive strategic leadership literature has examined CEO turnover and succession, research is lacking on the succession of top management team (TMT) members or non-CEO executives at the individual level. By focusing on a specific executive position—the chief human resources officer (CHRO)—this study examines how executive succession in conjunction with a gender shift occurs. Although women are underrepresented in TMTs, we observe an increase in the number of women appointed to the role of CHRO. By utilizing social role and social categorization theories, we describe the dynamics of the gender shift in the CHRO position. We find that CHRO succession with a gender shift is not prevalent and that male-to-male or female-to-female successions are more common. However, our results suggest that CEOs’ board positions in a firm with a female CHRO and the industry-level diffusion of female CHROs tend to be negatively associated with male-to-male CHRO successions. Our results highlight how such factors may mitigate the effect of social role perceptions.