Donald C. Hambrick

Our field has lost its way. Leadership is what people do in order to influence others so that the others can and will contribute to the objectives of the collective. And yet, when looking at recent leadership research, the “what people do” – the behavioral elements as shown in true actions and choices – are almost completely absent. They have been replaced by evaluative surveys that tend to have tenuous links to reality and correspondingly limited policy implications. If our discipline is to advance as a science and achieve impact, we need to move beyond the ritualized use of questionnaires and become true behavioral scientists, with behaviors as the fundamental units of our understanding. Against this background, in this editorial we discuss the theoretical, operational, and empirical limitations of questionnaires for studying leadership. We then highlight examples of how researchers can better measure leadership as …

Business leaders have traditionally avoided wading into society’s debates. Yet more and more CEOs are taking visible public stands on hotly contested issues, engaging in what has come to be called CEO sociopolitical activism. Despite its growing prevalence and potentially major implications, this class of executive behaviors remains largely unexplored by organizational scholars. Our study tests and elaborates on stakeholder alignment theory to investigate the influence of CEO activism on employees’ attitudes and behaviors, particularly its effects on employees’ organizational commitment and support for the ideology underpinning the CEO’s public stance. Our theoretical predictions hinge on the degree of alignment between the CEO’s stance and the prevailing ideological tilt of the employee population, as well as the degree to which employees view the CEO as a credible leader. We test our ideas in the context …

Conceptualizing shareholder unrest as the aggregate scale and gravity of shareholder dissatisfaction with company practices, we examine the effects of two distinct types of shareholder unrest—wealth-oriented and corporate social responsibility (CSR)-oriented unrest—on CEOs’ career outcomes. Drawing on the concept of settling up, we hypothesize that CEOs are negatively sanctioned for both types of unrest in terms of reduced pay and increased likelihood of dismissal. Drawing on executive job demands theory, we argue that incumbent CEOs feel burdened by both types of unrest, leading them to voluntarily depart, and that new CEOs of unrest-laden firms receive larger pay packages as compensation for dealing with these inherited job demands. Overarching all these expectations, we argue that the effects of CSR-oriented unrest will be greater than the effects of wealth-oriented unrest, as CSR-oriented unrest …

Why do some CEOs become celebrities, while others with seemingly equal accomplishments do not? After two decades of research, far more is known about the substantial consequences of CEO celebrity than about its determinants. Drawing on the media routines literature, we develop and test a “push–pull theory” of CEO celebrity attainment, arguing and finding that (a) journalists pull certain CEOs into the limelight, particularly those whose firms are nonconformists within their industries and who themselves are demographically atypical; (b) CEOs, through various self-promotion tactics, can push themselves and their stories into public view; and (c) these push tactics are particularly beneficial for helping atypical CEOs achieve celebrity. We conceptualize CEO celebrity as an ordinal construct with discrete gradations, which we refer to as noncelebrities, B-list celebrities, and A-list celebrities. We test our theory using …

We apply the psychosocial concept of generativity, or one’s outlook toward the next generation, to the context of chief executive officer (CEO) succession. Integrating prior research on generativity and CEO succession, we identify two key orthogonal dimensions of CEO generativity: (a) the CEO’s degree of commitment to developing the next generation of company leadership and (b) the CEO’s degree of need to control the succession process and outcome. A given CEO’s place on these two dimensions constitutes their overall “generativity mindset,” which we conceptualize as a relatively stable motivational orientation that stems from the CEO’s disposition and accumulated life experiences. From these dimensions, we identify four archetypes: the generative, hyper-generative, hypo-generative, and anti-generative CEO. We then specify how the alternative archetypes affect an array of CEO actions throughout the CEO …

We examine the performance of outsider CEOs, who are known to be risky hires. Recognizing that boards are at informational disadvantages in assessing external CEO candidates, we invoke the concept of familiarity bias to set forth a counterintuitive expectation: Boards are especially susceptible to hiring mistakes when individual directors have professional linkages to external candidates, as this familiarity induces superficial assessments of these candidates; if hired, these CEOs have disproportionate chances of delivering poor performance. Based on a sample of outsider CEOs, we find that those who had prior ties to directors were appreciably more likely to deliver poor post-succession performance, compared to outsider CEOs who were not professionally linked to company directors. We discuss implications.

We examine the career outcomes awaiting individuals who are sponsored as corporate directors by activist hedge funds (AHFs), a growing population in American business. According to the behavioral theory of corporate governance, which emphasizes the importance of social cohesion and rapport among business elites, AHF-sponsored directors will be penalized for violating these norms. According to agency theory, however, which emphasizes shareholder primacy, AHF-sponsored directors will be rewarded for their visible commitment to shareholder wealth-maximization. We test these competing theories on a sample of AHF-sponsored directors and a matched sample (generated by coarsened exact matching) of conventionally nominated and elected directors. We find partial support for both theories: AHF-sponsored directors (relative to conventional directors) subsequently attain more new directorships, as …

Celebrity benefits chief executives personally: increased pay, more opportunities to join boards, and protection from dismissal. But their firms do not enjoy similarly positive outcomes. These CEOs often demonstrate higher levels of complacency, risk-taking, and hubris. But what leads them to attain celebrity in the first place? Jeffrey B. Lovelace, Jonathan N. Bundy, Tim Pollock, and Donald Hambrick write that a CEO’s personal attributes, a firm’s non-conforming actions, and a CEO’s use of self-promotion tactics play important roles in attracting high levels of positive media attention — with implications for individuals, firms, and society.