Demographic diversity (e.g., gender, age, race, ethnicity) in strategic leadership teams (i.e., boards of directors and top management teams) has received global attention recently. Policymakers have promoted diversity policies by citing the “business case” for diversity that suggests a positive (causal) effect on firm performance. Our focus is twofold: First, we systematically evaluate the methodological

Although leader behavioral adaptability is generally considered a strength, there may be situations where large abrupt changes in behavior diminish perceptions of leadership effectiveness. We argue that in teams with rotating leadership, within-person behavioral shift in relationship- and task-oriented behaviors when transitioning from a nonleader to a leader role will negatively influence follower

This research synthesizes the literature that investigated the influence of WOCB on various firm outcomes. We organize our review around the meaning of WOCB, the sources of WOCB influence, the outcomes of WOCB impact, and contextual factors. In general, 503 articles with 558 predominantly panel studies show that the relationships of WOCB to various outcomes (particularly corporate social responsibility

Studies show that genetics matter in who becomes a leader. However, we know little about the dynamic properties of the heritability of leadership emergence or how genetics might interact with environmental conditions to shape leadership emergence. We track leadership role occupancy at three time points among a cohort of 1,079 Danish twin pairs over ten years. Our results suggest that genetics matter

Extant research has used the COVID-19 pandemic as a context to test the “women leadership advantage during crisis” hypothesis. An influential paper reported that women U.S. governors were associated with fewer COVID-19 deaths. Building on this work, we demonstrate that methodological assumptions play a critical role in our interpretation of findings. First, we conduct a literal replication (Study 1)

Traditionally, leadership scholars often study snapshots of leaders in organizations. However, academic publishing offers a unique, more controlled context to study leadership with implications for leadership scholars and scholarship. Hence, we present a descriptive overview of women’s representation across 33 years in 11 top management journals across levels of leaders in academic publishing (i.e

A key assumption in modern conceptualizations of charisma is that it is a costly signal. It thus should be easier for intelligent individuals to produce this signal: it requires one to be creative, communicate in symbolic ways, have the needed expertise, and be consistent in one’s values and actions. At this time, it is unclear whether this assumption holds. Using data from an incentivized laboratory

As more women have entered the managerial ranks, discussion about differences between men’s and women’s leadership behaviors have persisted. The current study reviews and analyzes 50 years of research to examine gender differences in evaluations of their leadership behaviors. Across 13 new meta-analyses using data from 1970 to 2020, we examine evaluations of leadership behaviors that vary across two

The pay gap between those in leadership positions and other organisational members has risen markedly over the last five decades. There is evidence that this gap may undermine subordinate identification with and evaluation of the organisation and its leaders. To date, however, there is limited evidence that this gap affects related subordinate behaviour, including their willingness to follow their

Research transparency is critical for credible and trustworthy theory and subsequent practices and policymaking. However, checking for transparency is a laborious and time-consuming task. To facilitate this process, we introduce the (RTI v. 1.0). The program, available at , enables users to assess the level of transparency in both unpublished and published manuscripts. RTI provides feedback on the

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

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

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

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

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 and the county-level Republican vote share in 2016, but this correlation vanishes once

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

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

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 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

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

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Two increasingly popular domains of research have made great strides explaining leadership via an identity lens (). These domains focus either on a leader’s own identity or on a leader’s influence in representing and altering the identities of others. Our paper contributes to these areas by highlighting dominant assumptions underlying the literatures and generating counterfactual assumptions in need

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 lives on not because it has empirical support but because it flatters and appeals to elites, to the leadership

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

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

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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

Our field has lost its way. Leadership is what people do in order to influence others so that the others can and will contribute to the objectives of the collective. And yet, when looking at recent leadership research, the “what people do” – the behavioral elements as shown in true actions and choices – are almost completely absent. They have been replaced by evaluative surveys that tend to have tenuous

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

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

More and more scholars are expressing doubt about whether questionnaire-based and other human-rater-based forms of behavior measurement are trustworthy, even though many of these measures meet psychometric best practice standards. I identify a lack of behavioral counterfactuals as common yet avoidable underlying problem and the existence of behavioral counterfactuals as an overlooked validity criterion

Causality is essential in informing science and policy. In the present study, we investigate the current state of research regarding causality in the field of servant (and authentic) leadership and provide recommendations on how causally identified studies can be conducted. After explaining the methodological problems that potentially prevent causal inferences (i.e., endogeneity bias and issues in

Leadership scholars increasingly acknowledge the shortcomings of using questionnaires. Consequently, there is a trend towards more behavior-based research, with interaction coding as one promising method. By precisely analyzing recordings of leader–follower interactions, interaction coding helps quantify verbal and non-verbal behavioral patterns that unfold between leaders and their followers, thereby

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) –

One of the most important things leaders do is communicate. Though research on leaders’ communication has been active for half a century, to date there has been little effort to review it comprehensively and systematically. In this paper we review 260 articles that use leaders’ actual communication (textual, aural, and video) as data. We group these studies into four broad categories as a function

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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, videoconferencing has become a prominent aspect of many daily work routines. Despite the benefits of this development, scholars have argued that research should consider how trends that emerged during the pandemic may exacerbate pre-existing inequalities. As such, we draw upon evolutionary signaling theory to examine how videoconferencing technology may inadvertently

While CEO effect scholars agree that variation in firm performance tends to persist over time and that CEOs’ performance contribution should be gauged against a changing context, recent CEO effect studies addressing these issues have made extreme but opposite claims concerning the magnitude of the CEO effect. We show why recent findings that indicate a much larger CEO effect are spurious. We also argue

We use an event study design to provide evidence demonstrating how the trickle-down effect is influenced by the introduction of regulation on board gender diversity. In 2011, a new regulation was suddenly introduced for firms listed on the United Kingdom’s FTSE 350 index, the regulatory intervention put forward recommendations to increase the representation of women on the boards of FTSE 350 listed

We analyze a fundamental, but so far unaddressed, aspect of leadership and social comparison: how leadership can influence the employee social comparison processes inherent to performance contexts such that they are more conducive to subsequent performance. Based on the observation that people tend to compare in counterproductive ways, which detracts from future performance, we advance and test theory

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

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

In 2018, the Leadership Quarterly commissioned a Special Issue (SI) on replications of previously published studies in leadership. We adopted the Registered Reports path for this special issue to facilitate constructive reviewer feedback prior to data collection and to minimize any bias against non-significant findings in the publishing process. In this editorial, we reflect on how this approach worked

In the early 1900s, David Hilbert introduced a set of 23 mathematical problems. These problems caught the imagination of mathematicians around the world for the coming century and beyond. The advantage of such defined scientific puzzles is to galvanize coordinated efforts to pursue key scientific questions, whose answers can also address the grand challenges faced by society. Consequently, science

Does a greater representation of women in top management teams (TMTs) contribute to higher firm performance? Although several studies have investigated this question, they have failed to sufficiently account for endogeneity. We address the endogeneity problem by using an instrumental variable (IV) design to estimate the causal effect of women’s representation in TMTs on firm performance. We use a shift-share

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Using field and laboratory data, we show that leader charisma can affect COVID-related mitigating behaviors. We coded a panel of U.S. governor speeches for charisma signaling using a deep neural network algorithm. The model explains variation in stay-at-home behavior of citizens based on their smart phone data movements, showing a robust effect of charisma signaling: stay-at-home behavior increased

This meta-analysis explores whether leading-by-example increases contributions in public goods experiments. I find that leadership overall improves public good provision significantly, whereas leaders benefit less than followers. The reason is that followers match the leader’s contributions imperfectly and, on average, only contribute about 79% of the leader’s contribution. Consequently, only a small

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Whereas a plethora of research investigated subordinates who accept their leaders’ influence attempts (i.e., those who follow), we focus here on the reversed perspective, namely subordinates who decide not to follow their leaders’ requests. For example, a subordinate may intentionally lower their effort, regularly pass-off work tasks to colleagues, or take the leader for a fool. The purpose of the

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When treatment cannot be manipulated, propensity score analysis provides a useful way to making causal claims under the assumption of no unobserved confounders. However, it is still rarely utilised in leadership and applied psychology research. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, it explains and discusses the application and key assumptions of the method with a particular focus on propensity

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Major events in the private lives of CEOs have been a source of fascination for decades. However, despite gaining traction, studies on the relevant phenomena (e.g., marriage, divorce, parenthood, illness) remain scattered in parallel across disciplines. We thematically review the interdisciplinary evidence on the fast-emerging literature on CEO private life events (72 unique studies) to consolidate

For scientific discoveries to be valid—whether in theory or empirically—a phenomenon must be accurately described: The scientist must use appropriate counterfactuals and eliminate competing explanations. Empirical work must also use an appropriate design and method, and empirical claims made about the phenomenon must be correctly characterized. Moreover, valid empirical discoveries must be reliable

Often phenomena that are important to understand and predict are very rare. Rare events can prove difficult to analyze systematically because they do not generate many sampling observations. In this article I examine how small sample sizes can be studied scientifically. The article begins with an explanation of the distinction between research and science. I then bring to the fore the importance of

Researchers striving to ensure rigor in their scientific findings face a common pitfall: Endogeneity. To tackle this problem, scholars have increasingly adopted instrumental variables estimation (IVE). Although there are many published works showing how IVE should be used, many applied researchers still have trouble understanding how to use the method correctly. In this article, we provide a methodological