Assessing Senior Executives: The Impact of Context on their Roles

Abstract

This study assesses the leadership roles of senior executives/managers. It first offers an empirical construct of five roles for senior executives: mobilize; ambassador, driver, auditor; and servant. These roles reflect the perceptions of subordinate managers of the leadership roles of their superior senior executives. Second, it tests three hypotheses on the impact of the hierarchical level of the senior executives, the type of organization they manage (public vs. private), and the interaction between level and organizational type on senior executive roles. The data for this study were obtained from 1,687 senior to upper middle managers in three large Canadian organizations. The results showed that hierarchical level of the superior and the interaction between level and organizational type both had an impact on the roles of senior executives. The article discusses avenues for further research in senior management leadership roles.