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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最后修改: 2021年10月22日 星期五 09:09