Leadership Quarterly最新文献

Is the tendency to associate leadership effectiveness with a certain physical appearance universal, or is it a byproduct of electoral democracy? This paper reports the first paired-photo study of leaders in a nondemocracy. We first demonstrate that some basic findings of appearance-based leadership scholarship can be generalized to China. Chinese subjects can identify local politicians from their faces with above-chance accuracy. The faces of local political leaders are considered to be more competent, more trustworthy, and more electable than local nonpolitical leaders. We also push further our understanding of the political effects of the physical appearance of public officials by showing that Chinese politicians seem to be able to command obedience when subjects have the option to individually or collectively oppose an unfavorable arrangement. Overall, our evidence seems to suggest that there is a “prototype leader look” that potentially affects authoritarian politics.

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.

This article studies the importance of entertainment TV for the selection of political leaders in the context of an important case study: Donald Trump's win in the 2016 presidential election and his previous role as host of the popular TV show “The Apprentice.” We find a positive correlation between TV ratings of The Apprentice and the county-level Republican vote share in 2016, but this correlation vanishes once we control for pre-existing voting and NBC viewership patterns. This null result is robust to different model specifications, measures of exposure to The Apprentice, and an extensive investigation of heterogeneous effects. Viewership of The Apprentice is also unrelated to Congressional election results, as well as support for Trump in survey data and the Republican primaries. These findings highlight the context-dependent importance of television for political leadership.

Does loneliness matter for leadership? Recent years saw an increase in academic literature trying to answer this question. To evaluate if existing research could support theory and practice of the leader loneliness phenomenon, we reviewed the literature across levels of analysis and research paradigms, including 71 empirical articles. We identified four major conceptual and methodological limitations. First, the conceptual representation of leader loneliness is unclear and often conflates with general loneliness. Therefore, leadership-specific nomological networks are missing in theoretical conceptualizations. Second, the quality of some empirical findings is insufficient to support policy implications based on different research paradigms and levels of analysis have led to some inconsistent and unreconciled conclusions. Specifically, we could identify only two quantitative and three qualitative articles with policy implications. Third, the measurement of leader loneliness is often imprecise: some items are confounded with extroversion-introversion; some others measure the antecedents of loneliness. Fourth, the methodological concerns in prior work hinder the interpretation of many available findings. Specifically, some quantitative studies incur endogeneity issues, lack realism or costly outcomes in laboratory studies, whereas a number of qualitative studies involve research design issues and lack counterfactuals in theorizing. To contribute to better research practices on this timely topic, we offer suggestions for a better definition, improvement areas in measurement, statistical analysis to avoid endogeneity issues, and trustworthy qualitative research.

Considerable progress has been made in the field of leadership in recent years. However, we argue that this is undermined by a strong residual commitment to an older set of ideas which have been repeatedly debunked but which nevertheless resolutely refuse to die. These, we term zombie leadership. Zombie leadership lives on not because it has empirical support but because it flatters and appeals to elites, to the leadership industrial complex that supports them, and also to the anxieties of ordinary people in a world seemingly beyond their control. It is propagated in everyday discourse surrounding leadership but also by the media, popular books, consultants, HR practices, policy makers, and academics who are adept at catering to the tastes of the powerful and telling them what they like to hear. This review paper outlines eight core claims (axioms) of zombie leadership. As well as isolating the problematic metatheory which holds these ideas together, we reflect on ways in which they might finally be laid to rest.

We argue and show empirically that constructs and measures of positive leadership styles, such as authentic, ethical, and servant leadership, are not veridical representations of leadership behaviors. Instead, these styles conflate behaviors with subjective evaluations of leaders. Labelling behaviors as, for example, “ethical” means evaluating leadership behaviors on positively valenced terms rather than describing these behaviors. Across four experiments, we show that positive leadership styles are outcomes that depend on non-behavioral, evaluative factors, such as information about a leader’s previous success or value alignment between leaders and followers. More importantly, the measures of these leadership styles create causal illusions by spuriously predicting objective outcomes, even when leader behaviors and other leader-specific factors are kept constant. Furthermore, these measures have predictive properties similar to those of a purely evaluative measure of leadership. In conclusion, our studies cast serious doubts on previous research claiming that positive leadership styles cause positive outcomes. Moreover, positive leadership style research is not only wrong but also practically futile because its constructs and measures are amalgams that do not isolate concrete and learnable behaviors. We call for a radical reorientation of leadership style research and sketch out options for more solid future research.

The field of leader development has recently begun to focus more on the role of pre-adult leadership experiences in shaping leader development. However, research has largely neglected to account for children’s and adolescents’ agency in shaping their own leader development, instead focusing on external drivers of such development (e.g., parents, schools). This integrative conceptual article provides a model for leader development from childhood through adolescence, drawing on insights from the cognitive and social child development literature. This model focuses on the reciprocal influences of agency, early leadership experiences, and foundational socio-cognitive skills, including theory of mind, metacognition, self-regulation, and autobiographical reasoning, to foster growth and complexity in leadership skills and mindsets. In addition, the enabling forces that influence the early development and expression of agency, socio-cognitive skills, and leader mindsets are described.

The Leadership Quarterly has helped as a pioneer in accepting Registered Reports (RRs), a submission format where authors provide the introduction, theory section, and methods of their paper for peer review before data collection. Proud but never satisfied, we aim to further boost the number of suitable RR submissions due to our firm belief in their potential for fostering transparent, high-impact research. To inspire authors to explore diverse data collection strategies and methods beyond experiments and survey-based (replication) studies, this work presents four distinct but equally suitable research formats for RRs: meta-analyses, qualitative research, computational approaches, and field intervention studies. Expanding prior research that has explored and promoted general practices and methodological standards for RRs, we offer unique recommendations for preparing an adequate RR proposal along each of these four RR avenues. Additionally, we provide a table of summary resources for authors, reviewers, and editors looking to engage more with RR. In conclusion, we envision a future where other top-tier journals and funding agencies follow The Leadership Quarterly by embracing the incorporation of RRs as a critical component of their strategic approach.

Leaders today must motivate followers to engage in organizational change. Although leader change visions are considered a key motivator, limited research and theory explore how leaders’ use of different change visions influences the extent to which followers are motivated to pursue organizational change goals. Building on issue selling and sensemaking literatures, we offer an expanded typology of leader change visions that more fully represents how leaders can depict the future state of their organization to create a case for change. We further propose a framework that explains how and under what conditions leader change visions motivate followers—individually and collectively—to support change efforts. To explain how followers respond to change initiatives, we highlight the role of regulatory construal fit—the degree to which leader change visions fit with followers’ understanding of the threats or opportunities facing the organization—and regulatory focus fit—the extent to which leader change visions fit with followers’ goal pursuit focus. In addition to contributing to a fuller understanding of the motivational underpinnings of leader change visions, our framework can help leaders tailor their communication to engage followers in the pursuit of organizational transformation goals.