Reading: What is Strategic Leadership? Developing a Framework for Future Research

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The Leadership Quarterly

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Full Length Article

What is strategic leadership? Developing a framework for future research

Mehdi Samimia,⁎,1, Andres Felipe Cortesa,b,1, Marc H. Andersonc, Pol Herrmannd

a Department of Management, Debbie and Jerry Ivy College of Business, Iowa State University, 3235 Gerdin Business Building, Ames, IA 50010, United States of America

b Department of Management, Jack Welch College of Business & Technology, Sacred Heart University, 1037 West Campus East Building, Fairfield, CT 06825, United States

of America

c Department of Management, Debbie and Jerry Ivy College of Business, Iowa State University, 3113 Gerdin Business Building, Ames, IA 50010, United States of America

d Department of Management, Debbie and Jerry Ivy College of Business, Iowa State University, 2353 Gerdin Business Building, Ames, IA 50010, United States of America

A R T I C L E I N F O

Keywords:

Strategic leadership

CEO

TMT

Board of Directors

A B S T R A C T

We attempt to bring clarity to the concept of strategic leadership and guide its development by reviewing and

synthesizing the existing management literature on how top managers and board directors influence organizations.

We propose a new definition of strategic leadership and offer a framework organized around the essential

questions of what strategic leadership is, what strategic leaders do, why they do it, and how they do it. To

answer these questions, we organize our review around the eight functions strategic leaders serve, the key

attributes of strategic leaders, the theories scholars have used to relate these functions and attributes to outcomes,

contextual factors, and the organizational outcomes that strategic leaders affect. We identify how strategic

leadership research is concentrated in five streams that rarely interact with each other, and offer suggestions

for connecting these streams. Our review provides a big picture of what is known about individuals at

the top levels of organizations and highlights the key areas where future investigation is essential.

Introduction

How the behaviors and decisions of strategic leaders (CEOs, top

managers, and board directors) impact organizations has long been a

focus of management theorists, from classical works on executive behavior

(Barnard, 1968; Mintzberg, 1973) to Hambrick and Mason's

(1984) influential upper echelons perspective and the extensive research

on boards of directors (e.g., Boyd, Haynes, & Zona, 2011; Forbes

& Milliken, 1999). Although we have learned much from this vast and

expanding field of research, a surprising lack of consensus remains on

the concept of Strategic Leadership, as is evident from the wide variety of

definitions and conceptualizations of strategic leadership that exist in

the literature. In addition, the considerable fragmentation of the field

and the lack of a cohesive set of findings highlight the need to present a

more compelling definition of strategic leadership and to organize the

field through an integrative framework that suggests opportunities for

future research.

We address this need by offering a comprehensive and integrative

framework of strategic leadership and several directions for future research.

Our work is motivated by the essential questions of what strategic

leadership is, what strategic leaders do, why they do it, and how

they do it. To answer these questions, we organize our review in terms

of the functions of strategic leadership, the attributes of strategic leaders,

the firm-level outcomes that strategic leaders influence, the theories and

mechanisms that relate strategic leaders to these outcomes, and the

contextual factors that moderate these relationships. We present an

overview of our strategic leadership framework in Fig. 1.

Previous reviews have synthesized the literature relevant to individuals

at higher organizational levels (mainly CEOs, TMTs, and the

CEO-BOD interface). Table 1 lists many of these and summarizes their

foci and conclusions. These reviews represent valuable efforts to understand

strategic leadership and provide useful guidelines for future

research. They also acknowledge that the literature is highly fragmented

because of the wide variety of studied constructs (and measures)

and firm-level outcomes, which makes it challenging to integrate

findings and explanations and which causes theoretical silos. Common

suggestions from these reviews are to reduce the fragmentation problem

by using more encompassing constructs, performing large-scale

studies to test multiple constructs simultaneously, developing and

testing sequential process models, or integrating different theories (e.g.,

Bromiley & Rau, 2016; Liu, Fisher, & Chen, 2018; Wowak, Gomez-

Mejia, & Steinbach, 2017). We acknowledge and agree with these

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2019.101353

Received 29 November 2018; Received in revised form 18 October 2019; Accepted 21 November 2019

⁎ Corresponding author.

E-mail addresses: samimi@iastate.edu (M. Samimi), cortesortiza@sacredheart.edu (A.F. Cortes), mha@iastate.edu (M.H. Anderson),

pol@iastate.edu (P. Herrmann).

1 Shared first authorship.

The Leadership Quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxxx

1048-9843/   2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Mehdi Samimi, et al., The Leadership Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2019.101353

suggestions. However, we also suggest that the apparent fragmentation

of the literature is the result of the complexity of the topic and that an

organized perspective of these silos would be useful to advance strategic

leadership research. More specifically, we show that the role of

strategic leaders is multifaceted and complex, and that it can manifest

in various firm-level outcomes in vastly different ways. We argue that

developing theories and conducting studies that focus on the different

aspects and dimensions of strategic leadership will enable future

scholars to build the coherent and comprehensive set of findings that

strategic leadership scholars have called for. By organizing these dimensions

of strategic leadership, our framework illustrates possibilities

to connect separated perspectives and answer questions that are beyond

the focus of one perspective.

Our review makes several contributions. First, we provide an integrative

framework of strategic leadership that considers the role of all

individuals at top organizational levels by including research on all

strategic leaders (CEOs, TMTs, and BODs). Second, we address the

common “black-box” problem, i.e., the need to study the underlying

mechanisms of strategic leadership influence (Hambrick, 2007), by

acknowledging and specifying the different ways in which strategic

leaders influence firms. Third, by drawing on prior definitions and

conceptualizations of strategic leadership, we develop a new, comprehensive,

and concise definition of strategic leadership that draws clear

boundaries for the field and can guide its future development. Finally,

we illustrate the dominant streams of strategic leadership research and

develop guidelines for scholars to bridge theoretical silos while acknowledging

the multifaceted nature of the strategic leader role.

Definition

We begin our review by presenting prior definitions and conceptualizations

of strategic leadership in Table 2 and proposing a new

definition of strategic leadership. Strategic leadership is a term used

broadly to refer to either a type of leadership style or to leadership at

the top levels of the firm. We extracted definitions and common features

of strategic leadership from seminal works (e.g., Andrews, 1980;

Child, 1972; Mintzberg, 1973) and representative conceptual articles

(e.g., Boal & Hooijberg, 2001; Boal & Schultz, 2007; Crossan, Vera, &

Nanjad, 2008; Hutzschenreuter, Kleindienst, & Greger, 2012), and

found that a common conception of these works is that strategic leadership

concerns the role and influence of individuals at top organizational

levels.

We suggest that existing definitions and descriptions are either too

narrow and thus fail to capture essential aspects of what strategic leaders

do (which we will discuss later as the eight functions of strategic

leaders) or too broad (e.g., strategic leaders “configure and leverage

human and social capital to create value for the firm”; Hitt & Duane,

2002). Existing definitions typically either reduce strategic leadership

to the creation of meaning, vision, and setting the objectives of the

organization or merely specify who strategic leaders are (with the implication

that anything they do is “strategic leadership”). We also

wanted to avoid making our definition tautological by equating strategic

leadership with its outcomes, which scholars have recognized as a

problem with other leadership definitions (see Antonakis, Bastardoz,

Jacquart, & Shamir, 2016; van Knippenberg & Sitkin, 2013).

Based on these conceptions, we define strategic leadership as the

functions performed by individuals at the top levels of an organization

(CEOs, TMT members, Directors, General Managers) that are intended to

have strategic consequences for the firm. Our review identifies eight

functions: making strategic decisions; engaging with external stakeholders;

performing human resource management activities; motivating and influencing;

managing information; overseeing operations and administration;

managing social and ethical issues; and managing conflicting demands.

Identification of relevant strategic leadership studies

The domain of strategic leadership is broad and vaguely demarcated;

therefore to conduct our review we searched for articles in toptier

journals that studied the effects of chief executive officers (CEOs),

top management teams (TMTs), or boards of directors (BOD) on firm-

level outcomes, over the time period of January 2000 to October 2018.

Review articles necessarily need to define and limit their scope (Cooper,

1988), and we decided that articles published in the 21st century represented

a reasonable and longer timeframe than other reviews of

related literature, which have typically focused on a 10-year time

period (e.g., Bromiley & Rau, 2016; Wowak et al., 2017).

Similar to other reviews (e.g., Boyd et al., 2011; Busenbark et al.,

2016), we limited our search to the following top-tier management

journals: Academy of Management Annals, Academy of Management

Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly,

Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of

Management Studies, Leadership Quarterly, Organization Science, and

Strategic Management Journal. Our focus with this review was on synthesizing

a set of theoretical mechanisms identified in the literature

rather than to summarize its key empirical findings (Ahuja, Lampert, &

Tandon, 2008).

To find relevant articles, we read the titles and abstracts of each

article in every issue of each of the above journals during the established

timeframe. We verified our initial scan by searching each journal

using a combination of the keywords CEO, board, director, executive,

TMT, top management, strategic leadership, and strategic leader. Our

search process resulted in 326 articles that related strategic leaders to

firm-level outcomes.2 We do not discuss each of these articles individually,

but instead use selected examples to illustrate the accumulated

knowledge and explain our strategic leadership framework.

Studies of top managers or BOD that did not address how strategic

leaders' decisions and behaviors impact organizations did not fall under

our definition and hence were not included in our review. For example,

studies exploring how individuals reach executive positions (e.g.,

Fitzsimmons, Callan, & Paulsen, 2014) or how boards set executive

compensation (e.g., Geletkanycz, Boyd, & Finkelstein, 2001) were not

included unless they also studied firm-level outcomes. Therefore, we

did include studies of how executive succession or executive compensation

influenced firm-level outcomes (e.g., Makri, Lane, & Gomez-

Mejia, 2006; Ridge, Aime, & White, 2015).

We followed an inductive categorization process and engaged in

frequent discussions to develop our framework. The first two authors

independently assigned and reviewed the articles, and identified relevant

themes that could help answer our main motivating questions.

We discussed emerging themes and categories in depth, reassigned articles,

and debated our categorization until we reached a consensus. We

intend to answer the first question (What do strategic leaders do?) in

the functions section, the second question (Why do they do it?) in the

attributes section, and the third question (How do they do it?) in the

sections on theories and mechanisms and contextual factors. We also review

strategic-level outcomes that strategic leaders influence and thus

clarify differences between strategic leadership and other types of leadership.

Functions of strategic leaders

Strategic leaders are expected to fulfill specific roles and responsibilities

(Mintzberg, 1973, 1997). The primary existing classification of

responsibilities is Mintzberg's (1973) delineation of 10 managerial

roles, based on an analysis of five CEOs over the course of one week.

Subsequent work has distilled these into fewer roles (Kotter, 1982; Tsui,

1984). Rather than using a small sample of practicing managers, we

base our identification of the functions of strategic leadership on what

scholars have discussed in the literature. Moreover, executive roles may

have changed in the past half century, making our categorization more

relevant for strategic leadership in the 21st century. Our first goal in

reviewing the strategic leadership research was to categorize such

functions, provide a clearer view of the complexity of strategic leaders'

job, and highlight areas that need more investigation.

In this section, we discuss the eight main functions of strategic

leadership that we extracted from the literature. Table 3 shows descriptions

of these functions and our suggestions for linking strategic

leadership functions to various firm-level outcomes. Table 4 presents

example studies from the literature and relevant research questions.

Making strategic decisions

Strategic leaders influence organizations through the decisions they

make (Hambrick & Mason, 1984). Unlike decisions made at lower organizational

levels, upper echelons' decisions imply major allocations of

resources and commitments that can have lasting implications for firms

(Wang et al., 2016). Following this premise, scholars have explored the

roles of strategic leaders in making a variety of strategic decisions (e.g.,

with regard to innovation, acquisitions, strategic change, or diversification).

Research exploring this function concludes that a wide range of

motivations guides the strategic decision-making process and that such

decisions have important implications for firm-level outcomes (Wowak

et al., 2017).

Despite the large body of research on the strategic decision function,

several important aspects of the function are understudied. For example,

in terms of the strategic decision-making process, researchers

have given little attention to indecision (lack of decision-making) and

the discarding of available choices. Strategic leaders sometimes delay or

delegate certain strategic decisions because of potential difficulties or

possible negative outcomes. The drivers behind such behaviors and

their influence on the firm remain unexplored.

Leiblein, Reuer, and Zenger's (2018) recent work on the characteristics

of strategic decisions highlights relevant opportunities to explore

this function further. For example, available strategic alternatives are

likely a result of prior commitments and decisions (Leiblein et al.,

2018). An examination of changing patterns of strategic decisions over

time might be more insightful for understanding strategic leadership, as

gradual changes in a firm's strategy could reflect significant efforts from

leaders to change the course of an organization.

Engaging with external stakeholders

Strategic leaders build and manage relationships outside the firm

and represent the image of the firm to external parties. The external

leadership function encompasses leaders' interactions with external

parties that have the potential to influence the firm. These external

leadership behaviors can deliver strategic advantages, such as providing

access to important resources (Westphal et al., 2006) or enhancing

the firm's reputation (Carter, 2006). External relationships can

also help strategic leaders to navigate crises (Westphal et al., 2012).

One underlying theme of research on this function is that strategic

leaders engage in external leadership both proactively and reactively.

Future research could explore what different actions are required to

succeed in each and how strategic leaders vary in their abilities to

perform these actions. It would also be worth exploring how external

leadership varies among CEOs, TMTs, and BODs, as both the types of

relationships these types of leaders focus on and the benefits they extract

are likely to differ.

Performing human resource management activities

Strategic leaders make decisions regarding the selection, evaluation,

compensation, and development of other organization members. For

example, BODs appoint, evaluate, and dismiss the CEO (Cook & Glass,

2014; Graffin et al., 2013), which has important implications for the

firm. The BOD also sets the compensation of top executives, which influences

executive behavior and firm-level outcomes. Different types of

compensation incentives and possible compensation disparities among

2 A complete list of the studies is available upon request. executives can influence firm performance (e.g., Ridge et al., 2015).

Research also suggests that CEOs influence firm performance through

their emphasis on strategic human resource management systems

(Chadwick et al., 2015).

Future research is needed to increase our understanding of the

strategic leader's role in managing human resources. For instance,

leaders could set rewards and appoint specific individuals to motivate

strategy implementation and better performance, but might also incentivize

intense competition among organizational members or even

unethical behavior in attempts to accomplish set goals.

Motivating and influencing

A noticeable line of research explores how the leadership styles

displayed by strategic leaders are perceived by and influence followers.

Behaviors displayed by strategic leaders can unify, motivate, and encourage

followers to pursue a strategic vision as well as shape organizational

culture. One important underlying assumption in studies of this

function is that strategic leaders influence followers at lower levels of

management, with whom there is little interaction, through a cascading

influence (Bass, Waldman, Avolio, & Bebb, 1987). A prominent focus is

on transformational leadership and its influence on outcomes such as

firm performance, innovation, or climate (Boehm et al., 2015; Jung

et al., 2008; Ou et al., 2014).

Studying the specific behavioral styles that strategic leaders display

is valuable, but one significant effort is to contextualize these behaviors

more clearly for top organizational levels. For example, Berson, Halevy,

Shamir, and Erez (2015) argue that strategic leaders should construct

visions more broadly and abstractly compared to lower-level managers.

Additionally, the cascading effect has substantial complexity, as various

leadership styles may or may not influence outcomes at distant levels

(Chun et al., 2009). Overall, leadership styles may have different implications

at the upper echelons than they do at lower levels of management.

Furthermore, it might be possible to advance specific leadership

styles that are unique to top managerial contexts and to

evaluate whether motivation and influence emanate from the BOD.

Also, several leadership styles beyond transformational leadership

might have relevance for strategic leaders (Anderson & Sun, 2017).

Managing information

Strategic leaders gather, process, and use the information available

in both internal and external environments (Kaplan, 2008; Nadkarni &

Chen, 2014). Besides using that information to make decisions, strategic

leaders can influence the firm's access to information as well as its

integration and distribution throughout the firm (Cao et al., 2015;

Carpenter & Sanders, 2004). This research links closely to the principle

of bounded rationality and how strategic leaders tend to allocate their

attention. Gathering, processing, and distributing information can

shape the organization in several ways and represents a challenging

effort for strategic leaders that confront a wide variety of stimuli in

typically uncertain environments.

Strategic leaders have privileged access to information and can

choose to frame, distribute, and withhold it on the basis of various

interests. We speculate that strategic leaders have varied tendencies

regarding how such information is managed throughout the firm in

terms of content, timing, and communication tactics. How strategic

leaders use this privilege and its consequences for stakeholders is an

interesting avenue to explore. Some types of information may be more

noticeable, challenging to interpret, or difficult to communicate.

Existing information processing theories could add insight into this

function (see Oppenheimer & Kelso, 2015).

Overseeing operations and administration

Strategic leaders can be the architects of the organizational structure

(Beckman & Burton, 2008; Miller & Dr ge, 1986), set conditions to

support learning processes (Hannah & Lester, 2009), and put procedures

in place to monitor other organizational members (Wowak et al.,

2015). The ability of these initiatives to shape reporting relationships,

procedures, and controls can have significant implications for the implementation

of strategies, adaptation to changing environments, and

firm performance (Sine, Mitsuhashi, & Kirsch, 2006).

Few studies have explored the involvement of strategic leaders in

specific, operational decisions that are made on a day-to-day basis

(Wang et al., 2016). Although the importance of setting firms' strategic

direction is undisputed, activities essential to this function are crucial

for strategic leadership influence, because they set the organizational

context and influence the execution of initiatives. Qualitative methods

and theories from other business disciplines could shed more light on

how this function is performed in practice.

Managing social and ethical issues

Research has linked strategic leaders to a variety of outcomes related

to social or ethical issues, ranging from engagement in fraud or

tax avoidance (Zahra et al., 2005) to corporate social responsibility

(CSR) (Petrenko et al., 2016; Tang, Qian, et al., 2015). In turn, these

behaviors and initiatives have important implications for stakeholders,

firm reputation, and performance (Zahra et al., 2005). Strategic leaders,

especially CEOs, have considerable discretion regarding decisions about

tax avoidance or resource allocation for CSR (Waldman & Siegel, 2008).

Furthermore, strategic leaders are usually accountable for major ethical

scandals, even if they are unaware of them (Kollewe, 2015). This

function is becoming increasingly important as stakeholders demand

that organizations be more responsible social actors.

Conceptual work on destructive and responsible leadership has

provided frameworks that can guide future research on this function

(Krasikova, Green, & LeBreton, 2013). The nature of ethical dilemmas

faced by strategic leaders and how these dilemmas vary among CEOs,

TMTs, and BODs is an interesting avenue for future work. For example,

important challenges at the strategic leadership level are estimating the

negative consequences of particular initiatives and finding ways to

disincentivize inappropriate and illegal behavior.

Managing conflicting demands

A prominent line of research centers on how strategic leaders reconcile

and pursue conflicting goals and directions for the firm, such as

exploration and exploitation or long- and short-time horizons (Lavie,

Stettner, & Tushman, 2010; Smith & Tushman, 2005). Their role extends

to managing conflicts and disagreements, which can lead to significant

group decision-making tendencies that influence firm performance

(Georgakakis et al., 2015; Zhu, 2014). Factors that help leaders

to address conflicting strategic issues include transactive memory, behavioral

integration, leadership styles, and CEO and TMT shared experience

(Carmeli & Halevi, 2009; Heavey & Simsek, 2014; Jansen

et al., 2009; Lubatkin et al., 2006).

Conflict and power differences among strategic leaders (within the

TMT, between the CEO and the TMT, and between the board and the

CEO or other top managers) could be studied further by exploring why

and how these conflicts arise or how leaders attempt to solve them.

Krause, Priem, and Love's (2015) study on power gaps between co-CEOs

and Garg and Eisenhardt's (2017) qualitative inquiry on CEO/BOD relationships

are good examples of how to approach this topic. From an

individual-level perspective, more attention could be placed on how

strategic leaders interpret and reconcile conflicting information to

make decisions with firm-level impact. Different stakeholders remain

under-explored as sources of conflicting information and challenges for

strategic leaders (Wong et al., 2011). Handling these conflicts might

have important implications for strategic leaders' behavior. For example,

such disagreements might provide strategic leaders with challenging

demands that might increase the stress they manifest in their

leadership (see Hambrick, Finkelstein, & Mooney, 2005).

Strategic leaders' attributes

We use the term “attributes” for the traits, skills, and characteristics

of strategic leaders at the individual and team levels. We review and

classify these attributes in this section and present relevant examples

and research directions in Table 5.

Individual-level characteristics

Dispositions

Scholars have assumed that the dispositional traits of strategic leaders

affect their decisions and behaviors and are reflected in firm-level

outcomes (Hambrick & Mason, 1984). Among the most studied attributes

of strategic leaders in our review are personality traits, including

the Big Five, core self-evaluations, and narcissism (Gerstner, Konig,

Enders, & Hambrick, 2013; Nadkarni & Herrmann, 2010; Zhang, Ou,

Tsui, & Wang, 2017). Difficulties in measuring the personality characteristics

of strategic leaders directly have led researchers to use

proxies such as demographic variables. For example, risk-taking propensity

has mostly been studied using proxies such as age or political

orientation (Christensen et al., 2015). However, using proxies is problematic;

results of a recent meta-analysis, for instance, do not support

the use of age as a proxy for risk-taking (Wang et al., 2016). It is also

essential to differentiate the dispositional risk-taking propensity of

leaders from strategic risk-taking at the firm level, despite the likelihood

that they are related. Given the problems of using demographic

proxies (Carpenter et al., 2004), more scholars are directly measuring

personality traits in recent years and this is a definite improvement in

methodology (Harrison, Thurgood, Boivie, & Pfarrer, 2019).

firms and inconsistent consequences of constructs that theoretically

overlap (e.g., narcissism and hubris) have raised the need to use holistic

frameworks and investigate the impact of various constructs simultaneously

(Bromiley & Rau, 2016). Capturing and comparing multiple

constructs in the same study represents a necessary effort to determine

their relative importance in shaping strategic leaders' behavior (Wowak

et al., 2017).

Managerial cognition

The managerial cognition literature studies factors that affect executives'

attention, interpretations, and consequent decisions (Daft &

Weick, 1984; Ocasio, 1997). The cognitive view contends that executives'

cognition is an important driver of the strategic orientation of

firms, in contrast to an economic or deterministic view, which recognizes

external factors such as industry structure and firm capabilities

as the primary drivers (Nadkarni & Barr, 2008). Research in this area

confirms the impact of managers' cognition in conjunction with environmental

factors on the strategic actions of firms, questioning the

boundary between the economic and cognitive perspectives (Kaplan,

2008; Kiss & Barr, 2015), and suggesting the need to study environmental

and cognitive factors jointly because they are not independent.

For example, Nadkarni and Barr (2008) found that the cognitive frameworks

of top managers mediate the relationship between industry

velocity and strategic actions. Overall, the cognition literature acknowledges

the importance of individual dispositions and environmental

factors in shaping cognitive processes that interact with contextual

factors to affect the strategic actions of firms. Our review of the

managerial cognition literature reveals a vast number of constructs that

have often been used interchangeably (e.g., mental models/maps,

cognitive representations/ frameworks), and this suggests the need for

an integrative guiding framework.

Charisma

House (1976) characterized charismatic leaders as those with traits

such as exceptional self-confidence as well as strong motivation to attain

and assert influence. Although executives' charisma could be expected

to increase subordinates' motivation and ultimately firm performance,

findings are mixed (e.g., Tosi, Misangyi, Fanelli, Waldman, &

Yammarino, 2004; Waldman, Javidan, & Varella, 2004). In an attempt

to reconcile the diverse conclusions in the literature on CEO charisma,

Agle et al. (2006) conducted a longitudinal study and found that although

organizational performance is associated with subsequent perceptions

of CEO charisma, the opposite is not true. Recently, Wowak

et al. (2016) examined more proximal strategic outcomes of CEO

charisma and found evidence that it impacted strategic dynamism,

strategic nonconformity, and CSR.

Power and motivation

Corporate governance researchers have studied power and motivation

by considering strategic leaders' compensation and ownership,

under the assumption that managers are self-interested and risk-averse

(Eisenhardt, 1989) and that powerful strategic leaders have greater

discretion (Tang et al., 2011). Studies of motivation usually focus on

extrinsic motivation by investigating the role of compensation on behavior,

especially when managers have discretion to pursue self- interests.

Agency theorists have mostly looked at CEO power by studying

duality (CEOs who also serve as the board chairpersons), neglecting

other drivers and types of power. However, Park and Tzabbar (2016)

explored various consequences of structural and expert power. While

the literature supports the role of power and incentives on the strategic

actions of executives, our understanding in this area is limited by the

focus on economic incentives and formal sources of power. Considering

other motivators, such as professional achievements, social recognition,

or task-related factors that create intrinsic motivation could complement

this research.

Managerial knowledge, skills, and abilities

Scholars have emphasized the importance of strategic leaders'

competencies (Andrews, 1980; Helfat & Peteraf, 2015), assuming that

the effective execution of leadership functions requires superior competencies.

Not surprisingly, executive performance is predicted by direct

measurements of competencies such as problem-solving as well as

indirect proxies such as university degrees to capture intelligence.

Several conceptual articles have proposed specific skills and abilities as

playing important roles in strategic leadership processes. Researchers

have argued that some of the skills and competencies required for top

managers include timely decision making (Boal & Hooijberg, 2001),

cognitive and behavioral complexity (Boal & Hooijberg, 2001), thinking

with large horizons (DeChurch et al., 2010), the courage to defend

strategies (Andrews, 1980), and the ability to adapt leadership styles

(Vera & Crossan, 2004). Future empirical research is needed to examine

these characteristics.

Another approach to studying managerial competencies is to focus

on how executives gain specialized knowledge and how these contextspecific

competencies affect their performance. This approach emphasizes

strategic leaders' firm-, industry-, and job-specific knowledge and

experience. For example, Cummings and Knott (2018) found that insider

CEOs are more successful than outsiders in managing R&D resources

effectively. Bermiss and Murmann (2015) found that the loss of

a top executive with a functional background is more harmful to a firm's

survival than losing a top executive whose background is in managing

external relationships. Some examples of context-specific competencies

that affect subsequent actions include the CEO's experience in implementing

a certain strategy (Westphal & Fredrickson, 2001),

international exposure (Lee & Park, 2008), and the CEO's education

(Datta & Iskandar-Datta, 2014).

A third approach views competencies as credentials, observable

strategic leaders' characteristics—such as affiliations—discernable to

the public and BOD and capable of affecting firms by signaling legitimacy.

Directors or investors often rely on heuristics to assess the potential

value that a certain leader might bring to a firm. Credentials

such as celebrity should be a focus of future research (Treadway,

Adams, Ranft, & Ferris, 2009).

Group-level characteristics

Diversity

TMT heterogeneity, which refers to variation in strategic leaders'

attributes, has been the central construct in TMT composition research

(Hambrick et al., 2015). Scholars have viewed TMT heterogeneity as a

double-edged sword that can be beneficial for certain purposes in

specific contexts and detrimental in others. According to the information-

processing perspective, demographic heterogeneity may be considered

a valuable resource because it provides multiple perspectives as

well as increased levels of information (Bantel & Jackson, 1989;

Elenkov et al., 2005), thus enhancing idea generation in firms or

management of cross-border activities. On the other hand, TMT diversity

may lead to interpersonal and affective conflict, which can potentially

harm firm performance (Amason, 1996; Hambrick et al.,

2015). Team diversity may also lead members to sort each other into

social categories or to create hypothetical divides that may split a group

into subgroups (Cooper et al., 2014). These divisions can create negative

stereotypes of members of other categories and are harmful to team

integration and communication (Bantel & Jackson, 1989). Despite

mixed findings regarding the effects of TMT diversity (Certo, Lester,

Dalton, & Dalton, 2006), there seems to be consensus regarding the

negative effects of bio-demographic faultlines on strategic outcomes

(Hutzschenreuter & Horstkotte, 2013; Ndofor, Sirmon, & He, 2015).

Adding potential moderating and intervening factors could provide

dynamic process theories of TMT characteristics and firm-level outcomes

and help resolve inconsistent findings in this literature (Certo

et al., 2006; Wei & Wu, 2013). For instance, Hambrick et al. (2015)

showed that the effect of TMT heterogeneity on firm performance depends

on the TMT's role interdependence. Future research could explore

how diversity among strategic leaders affects strategic leadership

functions. For example, TMT behavioral integration could help leaders

manage contradictions (Carmeli & Halevi, 2009; Lubatkin et al., 2006).

Additionally, diverse teams might be better at handling functions that

require heterogeneous competencies.

TMT compensation

Scholars have explored the consequences of TMT compensation

differences. Building on social comparison theory, Carpenter and

Sanders (2004) argued that CEO-TMT pay disparity creates perceived

inequity in the TMT and leads to behavioral fragmentation and possible

turnover, damaging information-processing ability and subsequent firm

performance. On the other hand, tournament theory suggests that pay

dispersion promotes competition within the team and positively affects

team performance (Fredrickson et al., 2010). Although it has received

less attention than CEO compensation, TMT compensation is an important

part of the human resource function, and studying it might

reveal CEOs' approaches to performing this function. Prior research has

investigated the consequences of TMT compensation, but not its predictors.

TMT knowledge, skills, and abilities

The upper echelons perspective suggests that strategic leadership is

not limited to the actions of CEOs, highlighting the importance of other

top managers, who also need certain competencies to perform their

functions effectively. Such capabilities not only affect the performance

of executives but also signal outsiders, especially in small and young

firms in situations such as initial public offerings (IPOs). Additionally,

some researchers have compared TMT members' capabilities with those

of CEOs to study top managers' eligibility to become CEOs and how the

existence of an heir apparent affects strategic outcomes (Ridge et al.,

2015; Shen & Cannella, 2003). Future research should investigate the

relationship of TMT capabilities and the distribution of capabilities

within the TMT to the execution of strategic leadership functions.

CEO-TMT interface

A recent trend is to study strategic leader interactions, particularly

between CEOs and their TMTs. For example, TMT members can respond

negatively to CEOs who develop relationships of better quality with

other team members, generating consequences for the TMT's potency or

psychological empowerment (Lin & Rababah, 2014; Zhang et al., 2015).

Research on the CEO-TMT interface has also focused on demographic

(dis)similarities between CEOs and TMTs. Just like TMT heterogeneity,

CEO-TMT differences can have positive consequences via

better information processing or negative effects via conflict and poor

communication. For instance, Georgakakis et al. (2015) found a positive

impact of CEO-TMT socio-demographical similarity on tenure

overlap, whereas Ling, Wei, Klimoski, and Wu (2015) found that dissimilarity

in informational demographics between CEOs and TMTs

enhanced the effectiveness of CEO empowering leadership on firm

performance, especially with increased CEO-TMT tenure overlap. In

general, CEO-TMT interface studies, which are rapidly increasing in

number, could benefit from team-level studies developed in the field of

organizational behavior (see Maloney, Bresman, Zellmer-Bruhn, &

Beaver, 2016). Moreover, CEO-TMT interface factors can complement

our understanding of individual- and team-level attributes, because it is

possible that the impact of several individual- and team-level factors

depend on the interface factors. For example, certain behaviors of CEOs

toward top managers might mitigate the negative impact of pay disparity

within TMT.

Theories and mechanisms

We classify the theories used to explain how strategic leaders influence

their firms into three categories: dispositional features and

strategic choice, strategic leader relationships, and external perspectives.

We present these categories, with relevant examples, in Table 6.

Dispositional features and strategic choice

This category consists of studies that connect leader attributes to

strategic leadership information processing and decision making, which

in turn shape the strategic choices made by leaders and subsequently

firm-level actions. Hambrick and Mason's (1984) upper echelons theory

is the dominating umbrella covering this group and arguably most

strategic leadership research (Finkelstein et al., 2009). This theory

draws on bounded rationality (March & Simon, 1958) to argue that

strategic leaders' decision-making patterns reflect their dispositions and

cognitive limitations, which in turn influence firm-level outcomes

through top managers' strategic choices. Scholars initially relied on

demographic and/or observable variables to capture executives' dispositions

or decision-making and behavior patterns, but studies now

increasingly attempt to capture strategic leaders' characteristics

through non-demographic variables (e.g., personality, attention, cognition)

to provide greater reliability and explore deeper cognitive and

behavioral influences (Bromiley & Rau, 2016).

Decision-making limitations and biases have been invoked to relate

dispositional features to strategic choices. For example, overconfidence

might lead executives to overestimate their abilities while underestimating

those of competitors and overlooking external factors that

might affect the firm. Such biases explain why firms with overconfident

CEOs are less responsive to corrective feedback (Chen et al., 2015).

Theories of behavioral decision making such as prospect theory have

been applied to strategic decisions, supporting the general premise of

bounded rationality and the use of heuristics by executives (e.g., Lim,

2015). Another research stream has included the study of routines and

the behavioral theory of the firm, leading to arguments about experience

and its effect on learning and subsequent decision making. For

instance, prior experience of executives in implementing a certain

strategy enhances the replication of that strategy in other firms

(Nadolska & Barkema, 2014; Westphal & Fredrickson, 2001).

A more in-depth look into the minds of strategic leaders has been

promoted in the managerial cognition literature, which studies mechanisms

linking leaders to firm-level outcomes based on their information-

processing attributes. Strategic leaders vary in terms of what

they attend to, how they interpret information, and how they make

decisions (e.g., Marcel et al., 2010). The environment might affect executives'

cognitive processes, but certain individual-level differences

such as temporal orientation can also explain why heterogeneity is seen

in firms' actions in similar environmental conditions (Nadkarni, Chen, &

Chen, 2015). Some scholars have broadened the scope of this research

by studying cognition at the team level and how executives develop

shared mental models (e.g., Souitaris & Maestro, 2010).

Another stream devotes attention to how strategic leaders influence

their firms through leadership styles. Drawing from the full-range

theory of leadership (Avolio & Bass, 1991), this area's proposed mechanisms

highlight the interaction between strategic leaders and their

followers to suggest how behaviors influence other firm members who

subsequently play key roles in determining firm-level outcomes

(Elenkov et al., 2005; Jansen et al., 2009).

Strategic leaders' relationships

Studies in this category focus on the relationship among strategic

leaders within and across firms and on how these relationships shape

firm behavior. Studies drawing on theories about teamwork, principalagent

relationships, and social comparison processes suggest that strategic

leaders can influence firm-level outcomes through their relationships

with other leaders. Theories in this category focus on the social

aspects of executives and emphasize the relationships between them.

For example, work drawing on social comparison theory (Festinger,

1954) and equity theory (Adams, 1965) highlights that executives

perceiving unfair compensation (relative to other executives) might

take actions that lead to a fairer situation or restore equality. The

economic perspective on this issue suggests that compensation disparities

also motivate top managers to increase their inputs and reach

higher strategic leadership positions (Wowak et al., 2017).

Some researchers, using the network perspective and the notion of

social embeddedness, have found that the connections of CEOs with

other firm members affect their access to critical resources (Chung &

Luo, 2013). The social network perspective goes beyond networks

within the boundaries of firms by suggesting how interlocking directors

can serve as bridges that connect firms via alliances (Beckman et al.,

2014).

Studies regarding executives' relationships often rely on dispositional

attributes to explain how such traits can affect firms through

relationships that executives develop. For example, narcissistic CEOs

favor working with new board directors who share their levels of narcissism

or with directors who have worked previously with narcissistic

CEOs, because such directors will be more supportive of CEOs' risktaking

decisions (Zhu & Chen, 2015).

Work drawing on agency theory focuses on corporate governance,

executive compensation factors, and the influence of these on executive

decisions. The main argument is that shareholders (principals) have

different risk preferences than managers (agents), who tend to pursue

their own interests (Hill & Snell, 1988). Additionally, the notion of

managerial short-termism suggests that executives often prefer projects

with shorter time-horizons even if they are suboptimal compared with

those with longer time horizons (Laverty, 1996). Alignment of these

risk and temporal preferences through compensation is supposed to

mitigate the agency problem. Factors such as CEO power or board

monitoring moderate the proposed relationships. Decisions that involve

a significant amount of risk or temporal trade-offs (R&D, M&As, and

large investments) can be explained by agency theory and are likely

affected by their associated levels of risk for the firm (Alessandri & Seth,

2014; Kroll et al., 2008; Sanders & Hambrick, 2007). In summary, the

application of agency theory in strategic leadership focuses on the

board-CEO relationship as an example of the principal-agent relationship

and investigates the mechanisms through which boards align CEOs'

and shareholders' interests.

Teamwork research considers the top management team to be the

major influence on firm behavior. The focus of attention is on team

members' interactions and conflicts and the flow of information within

the team. Differences among team members can be beneficial in that

they provide access to broader perspectives, various points of view, and

better decision making at the upper echelons, but they may also lead to

conflict and communication barriers (Ndofor, Sirmon, & He, 2015).

Research on strategic leader relationships also includes the shared

leadership perspective, which holds that leadership is often distributed

across a group of individuals in both an official and an unofficial

manner (Ensley, Hmieleski, & Pearce, 2006). The presence of co-CEOs is

one way to practice shared leadership formally, and research has shown

it can benefit firms as long as the unity of command is assured or not

disrupted (Krause et al., 2015). Shared leadership relies on the assumption

that a single individual often lacks the full range of abilities

required to fulfill the functions of leadership, so that sharing this responsibility

among those with complementary abilities might enhance

leadership effectiveness. In support of this idea, Hambrick and Cannella

(2004) found that CEOs who lack experience in operational activities

and in managing the focal firm are more likely to have Chief Operating

Officers (COOs). Because performing functions of strategic leadership

requires a vast array of competencies, we believe that the shared leadership

perspective is well suited for studying the effectiveness of

strategic leadership across its functions.

External perspectives of strategic leadership

This group includes studies of how firms' external environments

influence, or can be influenced by, strategic leaders. Scholars in this

area have relied on signaling and institutional theory to propose how

the market or stakeholders react to strategic leaders' actions and characteristics,

often invoking the concept of firm legitimacy. Outsiders

often do not have access to detailed information regarding a firm and its

executives and instead rely on observable attributes of executives to

make judgments about the firm (Zhang & Wiersema, 2009). The role of

executives' legitimacy is pronounced in situations such as IPOs in which

the market does not possess extensive information regarding the firm

(Cohen & Dean, 2005).

Some studies have explored how institutional pressures can induce

firms to disclose environmental information, depending on CEO education

and tenure (Lewis et al., 2014). While this stream of research

assumes that strategic leaders seek firm legitimacy, Yeung, Lo, and

Cheng (2011) questioned the motivation of leaders by showing that

adoption of certain practices (e.g., ISO 9000) does not improve firm

performance, but does increase CEOs' compensation.

Contextual factors

In this section, we review the boundary conditions and contextual

factors that shape the influence of strategic leaders on their organizations.

As Porter and McLaughlin (2006) argued, leadership in organizations

does not operate in a vacuum. Context is a major factor affecting

leadership behaviors and outcomes, and scholars have addressed the

importance of including context in studies of strategic leadership (e.g.,

Boal & Hooijberg, 2001; Osborn, Hunt, & Jauch, 2002; Porter &

McLaughlin, 2006).

We categorize contextual factors as internal and external. We follow

Johns's (2006: 386) definition of context as “situational opportunities

and constraints that affect the occurrence and meaning of organizational

behavior as well as functional relationships between variables.”

Thus, we consider situational variables that moderate the relationship

between strategic leadership attributes and firm-level outcomes as

contextual factors. We provide an overview of studied context variables

and their description in Table 7.

External context

We include in this category all moderating variables that constitute

contextual conditions outside the organization's boundaries. These external

factors consist of political or macroeconomic conditions, industry

and competition variables, and societal or cultural characteristics.

A prominent way to study the external context is to explore the

unpredictability or instability of the conditions in which firms operate.

A common argument is that uncertainty or dynamism in the industry, as

well as institutional deficiencies of the country, make strategic leadership

more challenging through increases in information processing

demands and the need to update strategies regularly (Qian et al., 2013;

Tang, Li, & Yang, 2015). Conversely, these conditions can give strategic

leaders symbolic importance and provide them with more opportunities

to rally followers (Agle et al., 2006).

Conditions of the external context can have a determinant role in

how certain strategic leaders' attributes shape firm-level outcomes. For 

example, in dynamic industries, a future temporal orientation by strategic

leaders leads to a higher rate of new product introductions, because

these leaders are better at detecting future market and technological

trends (Nadkarni & Chen, 2014). In turbulent environments,

companies led by owners, rather than by agent CEOs, have a higher

propensity to exit a business (Eisenmann, 2002). In addition, market

complexity constrains the market expansion efforts of founder CEOs

more than of agent CEOs (Souder et al., 2012). Certain social cultures

increase the influence of strategic leaders' transformational behaviors

on firm innovation (Elenkov et al., 2005).

Overall, the notions of fit and discretion are associated with the

external context. Some strategic leaders are better able to lead and have

a stronger influence on their firms under certain external conditions.

Analogously, external circumstances can make strategic leadership less

relevant and reduce strategic leaders' latitude of action. One opportunity

for future research is to organize these dimensions of the external

context to clarify their relative importance and the theoretical mechanisms

through which they challenge strategic leadership. Because

scholars usually do not include culture, competition, or macroeconomic

conditions in one study, it is unclear which of these contextual variables

has stronger implications for strategic leadership. Furthermore, stimuli

coming from these various dimensions of the external context are likely

to have different implications for different strategic leaders. For example,

leaders might pay more attention to specific stimuli because of

their own attributes or the characteristics of their firms.

Internal context

Scholars have taken three dominant perspectives in studying the

role of the internal context. First, the internal context can make it difficult

for strategic leaders to influence their firms, thus reducing the

leaders' discretion. Commonly studied variables for this argument include

firm age and firm size. As the size of the firm increases, so do

hierarchical levels and the distance between strategic leaders and firms'

operations. This distance might reduce the influence that strategic

leaders have on firm-level outcomes. In the case of age, the argument is

that routines and structures become less flexible as firms get older, thus

diminishing the ability of strategic leaders to make changes. Notably,

studies exploring the firm life cycle have shown an amplified influence

of strategic leaders in young and small firms (Ling et al., 2007; Peterson

et al., 2009; Tzabbar & Margolis, 2017).

Second, the internal context can either substitute for or highlight

the need for specific leadership attributes and behaviors. For example,

Holcomb et al. (2009) found that managers' ability is less important to

organizational performance when resource quality is lower. Hartnell

et al. (2016) found that CEO task and relational leadership have a

greater effect on firm performance in the absence of a task and relationship

culture. As another example, the family business context

increases the need for strategic leaders to be concerned about the longterm

socioemotional wealth of the family and not just short-term interests

(Strike et al., 2015).

Finally, the internal context can increase the complexity of the

strategic leader's job. For example, corporate instability reduces the

ability of outsider CEOs to achieve strategic change (Karaevli & Zajac,

2013), but outsider CEOs increase performance by providing legitimacy

when the firm has foreign institutional investors (Chung & Luo, 2013).

Ownership concentration and type of investors can be a source of

complexity for leaders, because investors can have different interests

and can monitor executives to pursue particular agendas (David et al.,

2001). Complexities can also arise from organizational task demands,

although CEOs may alleviate these by appointing a chief operating officer

(Hambrick & Cannella, 2004).

Strategic-level outcomes

In this section, we place studied firm-level outcomes of strategic

leadership into their most representative categories. Table 8 presents

these categories with examples and research directions.

Performance

Strategic leadership studies have focused on various measures of

firm performance as the primary outcome that strategic leaders affect,

given the economic relevance and established recognition of performance

as one of the most important in strategic management, as well as

its relatively agreed-upon measures. To date, dozens of studies in the

field indicate that strategic leaders matter for firm performance. Despite

the availability of established measurement tools and criteria, firm

performance can be difficult to study because it is a multidimensional

construct that can encompass profitability, growth, stock market, or

liquidity (Hamann, Schiemann, Bellora, & Guenther, 2013). Results

might vary if different performance dimensions are used, and the variation

could indicate conflicting effects that demand further theory

development. For example, strategic leaders might have a strong shortterm

influence on one dimension and a weak, long-term influence on

another. Additionally, strategic leaders may need to trade off performance

on one dimension with performance on another, and research is

required to examine the frequency and reasons for such behavior.

Strategic choices

Studying attributes and their effect on the content of strategic

choices is a recent and increasingly important trend in research on the

outcomes affected by strategic leaders. Instead of focusing on distant

outcomes (e.g., performance), studying strategic choices allows us to

understand the detailed processes through which strategic leaders affect

their firms. This approach is especially informative to the debated issue

of whether and how strategic leaders matter for firm performance (Liu

et al., 2018). Some scholars have studied the content of strategic

choices, such as their degree of risk (Kish-Gephart & Campbell, 2015),

whereas others have focused on strategic choice processes, such as

comprehensiveness or speed (Souitaris & Maestro, 2010). Both approaches

have led to the development of new measures while complementing

our knowledge of how strategic leaders affect their firms

through influencing firm strategic decisions.

Innovation

Research has supported the idea that strategic leaders' dispositions

and team-level behaviors influence innovation via the allocation and

management of R&D resources. While most research in this area focuses

on how strategic leaders affect innovation inputs, recent work has

studied the role of leaders in the effectiveness of innovative efforts.

Cummings and Knott (2018) found that insider CEOs are more successful

than outsiders in extracting value from resources devoted to R&

D and argued that one reason for the decline in R&D productivity in

firms is the increasing popularity of hiring outsider CEOs. Future

research should specify the mechanisms through which strategic leaders

influence a particular facet of innovation and employ measures

accordingly. For example, Perry-Smith and Mannucci (2017) suggested

that innovation encompasses the four stages of idea generation, idea

elaboration, idea championing, and idea implementation. Strategic

leaders can have different types of influence on each of these stages.

Some leaders, for instance, might be highly active in idea generation

while ignoring critical phases of implementation, while others might do

the opposite.

Social and ethical issues

Stakeholder theory highlights the importance of non-economic factors

in long-term performance and the role of strategic leaders in dealing

with moral and legal challenges (Freeman et al., 2004). Regarding social

and philanthropic responsibilities of the firm, research shows the influence

of strategic leaders on CSR (Hafenbradl & Waeger, 2017; Petrenko

et al., 2016). Concerning firms' legal obligations, strategic leaders have

been shown to affect corporate tax avoidance and product safety problems

depending on their political orientation and compensation

(Christensen et al., 2015; Wowak et al., 2015). Future research on this

topic can uncover strategic leaders' motives and incentives behind firms'

moral and illegal actions, the role of leaders in avoiding or engaging in

these actions, how leaders respond to or justify these actions, and the

implications of these actions on other firm-level outcomes.

Discussion

Decades of research on CEOs, TMTs, and BODs have explored the

various ways in which strategic leaders influence their organizations. A

wide variety of theories have linked an assortment of leadership attributes

to different firm-level outcomes (Bromiley & Rau, 2016;

Finkelstein et al., 2009; Wowak et al., 2017). Surprisingly, however,

there is no clear consensus on the concept of strategic leadership or a

widely-accepted organizing framework. We set out to answer the crucial

questions about the essence of strategic leadership, the main

functions of strategic leaders, the reasons for their behavior, and the

mechanisms that show how they influence organizational outcomes. In

doing so, we developed a definition and a framework of strategic leadership

and proposed directions to guide future research. In the following

paragraphs, we consolidate the main criticisms and suggestions

for the field, suggest guidelines for bridging existing theoretical silos,

and discuss the framework's contribution to practice. We also synthesize

the present (what we know) and the future (where we should go) of

the field in Table 9.

Consolidating and moving beyond firm performance

A critical effort for future studies is to move beyond the field's

prevalent focus on linking strategic leaders to a wide-ranging firm

performance construct, i.e., a construct conceived very generally and

measured in multiple and interchangeable ways. This focus has generated

a critical concern: relying on a general performance construct

leads to a spread of theories that face difficulties distinguishing the

mechanisms through which strategic leaders influence firms because

multiple antecedents are linked to the same construct. Ultimately, any

strategic leadership decision or behavior has a potential impact on firm

performance. We encourage strategic leadership scholars to address this

issue in future studies in two main ways. First, it is vital to acknowledge

the multidimensionality of the performance construct (see Hamann

et al., 2013) and develop theories that relate strategic leadership to

more precise performance dimensions. Moreover, the use of a performance

measure must follow theoretical reasons and be evident in

theory development.

Second, the multifaceted nature of strategic leadership we uncover

in this review indicates it might be time to consider moving beyond

performance measures and include other proximal outcomes.

Ultimately, the field of strategic leadership has the task of exploring

how individuals at higher organizational levels influence their firms,

which does not necessarily have to include a performance measure. Our

purpose lies in assisting strategic leaders with solid insights to guide the

various components of their organizations, and that is likely to require a

deep and focused theorizing of multiple firm-level outcomes.

Extending functions

Although we encourage a closer investigation of each function,

strategic leaders must often perform functions simultaneously. It is

likely that there are significant interactions among these functions and

that leaders' performance on one function affects their ability to perform

others. For example, motivating and influencing employees can

impact the implementation of strategic choices, and poorly managing

contradictions within the firm can affect external leadership by creating

a negative image of the firm. The limited resources and skills of strategic

leaders sometimes create trade-offs regarding these functions so

that leaders necessarily need to focus on one function at the cost of

ignoring another. Future research should examine the potential outcomes

of balancing the performance of these eight strategic leadership

functions. This effort not only helps with the field's attempts to explore

mediatory outcomes that precede firm performance and to develop

process models (Liu et al., 2018), but also helps to create theories that

provide richer explanations of the effects of strategic leaders' actions. In

doing so, we might uncover how certain actions have implications for

multiple functions and how strategic leaders attempt to manage the

different functions of their role given resource and attentional constraints.

Extending our knowledge about various functions also demands a

closer look at the strategic leadership attributes linked with each

function. Strategic leaders with specific attributes might tend to focus

on or be better at managing particular functions. For example, CEOs'

dispositional attributes influence their information processing and decision-

making patterns. However, it is important to consider that those

same characteristics are likely to influence how CEOs relate to other

strategic leaders such as non-executive organizational members (Fu,

Tsui, Liu, & Li, 2010; Raes, Heijltjes, Glunk, & Roe, 2011) and external

stakeholders. Transformational strategic leaders might excel at motivating

and influencing their followers but not design processes and

monitor results throughout the firm (Antonakis & House, 2014). Further

research should explore not only how various attributes influence

different functions but also how strategic leaders might compensate for

their lack of focus on specific functions by delegating these functions to

their TMTs or other organizational members.

A more active role of context

We highlight the variety of contextual factors that have been studied

to date. However, the dominant theoretical lens through which to view

context has been grounded in managerial discretion, i.e., the extent to

which managers can exert control over their firms (for a review, see

Wangrow, Schepker, & Barker, 2015). While discretion is undoubtedly

important, we suggest that context can play a critical role in strategic

leadership theories. Scholars can explore how the internal context can

motivate and initiate certain decisions and actions. The behavioral

theory of the firm, for example, explains how realized performance,

compared to aspirational performance, can trigger problemistic or slack

search (Cyert & March, 1963). Performance, in turn, can evoke certain

attributes in strategic leaders such as risk-taking behavior (Lim &

McCann, 2014) and advice-seeking behavior (McDonald & Westphal,

2003). Scholars can also explore how the external context might influence

strategic leaders' behaviors. For example, CEOs who enter the

workforce during prosperous economic times are more likely to use

unethical means for personal gain later in their careers (Bianchi &

Mohliver, 2016). The attention-based view of the firm is another theoretical

perspective that can explain how external factors shape strategic

leadership through bottom-up attentional processes (Ocasio,

1997). Supporting this view, Cho and Hambrick (2006) found that

deregulation in the airline industry changed executives' attention from

an engineering to an entrepreneurial focus. Thus, it is important to go

beyond a discretional view and consider context an important determinant

of strategic leadership behaviors.

Another suggestion is to theorize how strategic leaders influence

context (Weick, 1977), particularly the internal context where strategic

leaders may exert significant control on the basis of their authority. For

example, Liu et al. (2018) suggest that strategic leaders can influence

organizational processes such as culture or adaptability, and Zhang

et al. (2017) found that CEO personality shapes firms' innovative culture.

In turn, these contextual factors can drive strategic leaders' influence

on firm performance (Liu et al., 2018). The influence of strategic

leaders on their context (rather than how their effects are shaped

by it) represents a significant direction to advance strategic leadership

theorizing.

Finally, future research can consider the internal and external

contexts simultaneously. For example, strategic leaders of established

firms in a highly dynamic industry often face different demands than

leaders of young firms entering that industry. Thus, an exclusive focus

on either the internal or external context might be incomplete, especially

considering that both contexts impose simultaneous attentional

demands on strategic leaders.

Tailored theories

Strategic leadership, as a rapidly growing field, lacks theories that

are primarily developed to study it, and except for upper echelons,

theories are borrowed from other areas and often not customized to the

specific characteristics of the field. Upper echelons theory played an

important role in the growth of the field by suggesting the use of demographic

variables to capture personality and cognitive attributes of

strategic leaders, although the use of demographic variables is losing its

attractiveness with advances in strategic leadership research. However,

upper echelons theory remains the only theory specific to the field of

strategic leadership. Comparing the strategic leadership literature with

the more established micro-OB leadership research and its rich body of

theories reveals the need for theories exclusively developed to study

leadership at the strategic level. New theorizing can be built upon other

established theories such as agency or institutional theory but should

consider the uniqueness of the strategic leadership context. While we

advocate the adoption of theories from other fields, we believe that

strategic leadership should be more than a context for testing the theories

of other fields. Perhaps it is time to focus on how strategic leaders

and their tasks constitute a unique context and study the adjustments

needed to account for differences from other contexts. For example,

researchers need to explain how TMT diversity differs from that of a

random team of employees working together on a project or how

transformational leadership behaviors at the CEO level might differ

from those at lower levels.

Integration of silos

By classifying strategic leadership studies, using the various components

of our framework, we can clearly distinguish five prevalent

research streams in the field. The upper echelons stream primarily

addresses how top managers influence their firms through strategic

decisions, given their attributes and dispositions. The agency theory

stream primarily explores the influence of the CEO-BOD relationship on

the firm. The teamwork stream primarily explores the influence of the

TMT on the firm based on team diversity and conflict. The institutional

stream emphasizes CEOs' role in maintaining or enhancing a firm's legitimacy.

Finally, the micro-level stream focuses on how executives'

behaviors and leadership styles affect firm-level outcomes primarily

through motivating and influencing subordinates. In Table 10, we show

how these streams have focused on certain combinations of types of

leaders, characteristics, functions, contextual factors, theories, and

outcomes.

The evident differences in these five streams indicate the variety of

research questions that have been explored in strategic leadership.

However, we believe that an essential effort for future research is to

bridge these theoretical silos and distinguishable streams of research.

For example, by encouraging conversation between upper echelons and

agency theory perspectives, we can explore how individual differences

of executives might influence the role of executives' compensation in

shaping strategic choices. Similarly, by combining the micro and

teamwork perspectives, we can determine how certain leadership behaviors

of CEOs can moderate the relationship between TMT diversity

and firm-level outcomes.

The integration of these silos can allow us to expand the strategic

leadership field in useful directions that are currently unexplored. In

Table 11, we provide some suggestions on how these streams can mutually

inform interesting research opportunities.

Incorporating trends

We encourage scholars to rely on our framework to consider societal

trends that bring new perspectives to the field. For example, the prevalence

of high-tech companies, often with young founders as CEOs, or

billion-dollar startups founded and run by immigrants, are changing the

common conception of the demographics of strategic leaders and perhaps

question the application of existing theories. Movements in society

(e.g., gender equality concerns, changing views about the purpose of

corporations, increasingly activist role of corporations) might affect the

practice of and research on strategic leadership. Finally, increased use

of novel sources of information (e.g., social media activity or activity

trackers) combined with the application of newer methods (e.g., content

analysis and machine learning with big data) can be useful for

studying strategic leadership in the near future.

Conclusion

We have developed a strategic leadership framework based on an

extensive literature review and have attempted to bring more clarity to

the field. We have provided suggestions for extending investigation

beyond the usual streams of strategic leadership research and have

encouraged scholars to use our framework to uncover relevant and

novel research questions. We have also suggested that this framework

can bring order to a seemingly fragmented literature and spark an organized

development of the field. We hope that our framework assists

scholars in better defining the concept of strategic leadership and in

finding future opportunities for inquiry.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Peter Sun for his review of an earlier draft of

this manuscript. We are also grateful to the associate editor, Dusya

Vera, and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

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