Research on strategic leadership's role in achieving superior performance in technological innovation is still evolving, particularly regarding the effects of female directors and the contextual factors that enhance their effectiveness. This study provides a comprehensive view of female directors’ influence on R&D initiatives, innovation outputs, and innovation efficiency. Using Upper Echelons Theory and Agency Theory as the theoretical framework, the study employs fixed-effect regression for baseline outcomes, addressing endogeneity with prediction modeling, propensity score matching, and an instrumental variable approach on panel data from Chinese listed firms (2008–2021). Findings indicate that female directors not only enhance R&D investment but their presence on the board achieves higher innovation outcomes and ensures innovation efficiency. Findings also reveal that the interaction with CEOs is crucial, as newly appointed CEOs moderate the advisory role of female directors, while CEO power influences their monitoring role. The study also shows that female directors are more effective when they constitute a critical mass on the board rather than merely having token representation. These findings suggest that including women on the board is essential for superior innovation outcomes, especially when resource efficiency is a firm's priority.

Leaders at lower levels do not lead in a vacuum; they must lead within the context of the leadership they experience themselves from their next higher-level leader. We propose that lower-level leaders’ thoughts and attitudes and thereby their behaviors are influenced by the level of compatibility of their own style of leadership with that of their senior leader. Drawing from person-environment fit theory, we propose the concept of hierarchical leader-leader fit by assessing the level of congruence between the authentic leadership style of senior and junior leader dyads, and the resulting effects of levels of (mis)fit on the junior leader's behaviors in the form of performance and deviance. In two samples inclusive of both business and military leaders, using polynomial regression and response surface analysis, we find that fit (misfit) between the senior leader's and junior leader's respective levels of authentic leadership in the dyad is positively (negatively) associated with the junior leader's performance and is negatively (positively) associated with the junior leader's deviance. Surprisingly, when two leaders have high levels of fit, we find similar desirable effects on performance and deviance regardless of whether both leaders practice low (low-low) or high (high-high) levels of authentic leadership. Theoretical and practical implications of the degree of fit between leaders operating at different organizational levels, and of leadership as a contextually embedded relationship are discussed.

To contribute to the debate on whether leaders’ use of impression management is helpful or not, we examine the role of follower perceptions. We argue that followers who share a similar perspective as their leader about the value of impression management, as evidenced by their own use of these behaviors, come to identify with their leader and see them as having greater consistency between their words and actions, even though leaders’ impression management likely creates noticeable word-deed misalignments. In turn, the greater word-deed consistency attributed to the leader, also known as behavioral integrity, helps followers perform better. Our empirical test of these ideas confirms our reasoning and includes a multi-source field study with 89 triads of Korean managers, associate managers, and employees, a construct validation study with multi-source data (employees N = 160; manager N = 149), and an experimental study involving 189 American employees. Specifically, we found that leaders' use of impression management positively relates to followers’ attributions of their leaders' behavioral integrity which boosts follower performance but only for those followers who also engage in impression management. We confirm that when both followers and leaders engage in impression management, followers identify with their leader and thus view them as having behavioral integrity. These results demonstrate robustness across different research methodologies, different measures and tactics of impression management, and populations. We discuss the implications of this research to the fields of leadership, impression management and behavioral integrity.

Feminist thinking has contributed to changing views of women in society and in leadership positions. Yet women are still underrepresented in leadership, especially in key roles and at higher organizational ranks. In this commentary we examine the past, present, and future of leadership theories through a gendered lens, by considering them against the backdrop of feminist theory evolution. We first organize existing leadership theories according to four main feminist waves— gender reform feminism or “fixing the women” which corresponds with liberal feminism; gender resistance feminism or “the female advantage,” reflecting radical feminism; the gender rebellion feminism or “how is a wo(man) defined,” according to postmodern and intersectionality theories, and gender digital feminism or “hashtag and clicktivism revolution” that focuses on social media, cyber activism, sexual violence, and complex intersectionality. We further examine the implications and research findings of these theories for women and men in leadership. Second, we review the publications on gender and leadership in two exemplary journals publishing leadership research in the field between 2019 and 2022 and explore to which feminist wave the published works relate. We show that themes related to the first two waves of feminist thinking continue to be dominant in current leadership research and encourage moving into new terrains, utilizing current feminist thinking, in the study of leadership and gender. Finally, we raise awareness that in a gendered society, leadership theories may reproduce and reconstruct the existing social order and gendered arrangements, as well as map novel directions for future research.

For decades, scholars of strategic leadership have explored the degree to which senior executives and the team of top managers influence firm outcomes. However, one growing quasi-executive role in corporate settings, the chief of staff (COS), has been almost entirely ignored. Our paper presents a novel, foundational exploration of the COS role, including primary job functions and challenges, characteristics and backgrounds of incumbents, and relevance for strategic leadership and upper echelons theory. We synthesize three original sources of data — 2,500 LinkedIn COS profiles, surveys of 108 COSs, and in-depth interviews of 13 current and former COSs — to identify COS tasks and functions that interface with and influence the CEO, the top management team (TMT), and the broader organization. Though not typically considered a member of the TMT, we find compelling evidence for their ‘behind the scenes’ relevance to strategic leadership processes and outcomes. We then lay out a future research agenda comprising four domains: COS influence on CEO attention and psychological states, COS influence on TMT and organizational processes and outcomes, characteristics and conditions of organizations with a COS, and long-term career trajectories of COSs.

Based on the idiosyncrasy credit theory, this article empirically tests the idea that leaders are likely to be more (less) lenient toward more (less) competent subordinates for misconduct—employee behavior that should be punished. With a field survey of 103 supervisors and their 582 subordinates (study 1) and an experiment that manipulates subordinates’ competence and leader dependence on subordinates (study 2), the posited effect is found to be indirect through leader–member exchange (LMX) and stronger when the leader dependence on the follower was higher. The findings suggest that given the exact same misconduct, leaders are more likely to mete differential treatment based on perceived subordinates’ competency, and LMX quality works as the underlying mechanism for these effects. Thus, the present work highlights the dark side of LMX by demonstrating when and why leaders are likely to be compromised when it comes to disciplinary decisions and offers practical implications for organizations on how to handle employee misconduct. Theoretically, our work suggests that the quality of relation between credit holders and those responsible for overseeing norms functions as the underlying mechanism for the idiosyncrasy credit theory.

Unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) has received growing attention from organizational scholars in recent years. As leadership is a key predictor of employee behavior in organizations, research focusing on leadership and UPB holds great potential for theoretical and practical advancements. The current paper presents a comprehensive systematic review of published research exploring leadership and UPB since 2010. The review not only situates the concept of UPB within the relevant literature, but also incorporates various analyses, including context, theoretical perspective, and research design. It also identifies the leadership-based independent variables, mediators, and moderators that impact UPB, which can help advance future theorizing in the field. Lastly, the paper offers suggestions for future research that can help in repositioning the field in order to build more reliable and valuable theoretical and practical policy recommendations.

We develop a multilevel framework that examines the simultaneous co-occurrence of charismatic leadership and abusive supervision and how they jointly diminish followers’ prosocial motivation. Furthermore, we tested a mediated moderation model to examine whether followers’ prosocial motivation mediates the link between charismatic leadership and followers’ citizenship behavior under high and low levels of abusive supervision. Results from a field study based upon 296 employees and 44 supervisors in 44 teams across three organizations provided support for the predicted relationships. Charismatic leadership positively influenced followers’ prosocial motivation when abusive supervision was low but not high. Furthermore, followers’ prosocial motivation mediated the link between charismatic leadership and followers’ organizational citizenship behavior when abusive supervision was low but not high. We discuss theoretical implications for abusive supervision's neutralizing effect, identify avenues to advance charismatic leadership and prosocial motivation research, and provide recommendations for practitioners to cultivate an environment that nurtures employees’ prosocial motivation.

Despite the recognized importance of leader development as a lifelong process, it remains unclear whether adolescents who engage in leadership will continue to do so into adulthood. Moreover, to what extent does leadership role occupancy facilitate internalizing future leader self-views? Conversely, to what extent does internalizing leader self-views facilitate future leadership role occupancy? The current paper examines these questions across three epochs of the lifespan (i.e., adolescence, early adulthood, and mid-adulthood) with a quasilongitudinal design. Drawing from a prospective database of 107 participants spanning over 26 years, we test within and between system effects of the leader experience processing system (i.e., leadership roles at ages 17, 29, and 38) and the leader self-view system (i.e., general self-concept at age 12, leader self-efficacy at age 17, and leader identity at ages 29 and 38). Structural equation modeling results support consistency in both systems, with more support for consistency in the leader self-view system. In addition, both systems mediate the other over time, suggesting a dynamic interplay whereby leaders integrate and build on leadership experiences in a process we call spontaneous leader development. Contrary to theory, we only found evidence for bi-directional relationships between systems in adolescence and early adulthood; in mid-adulthood at age 38, leader identity informed leadership roles but not vice versa. Implications of these findings for leader development theory are discussed.

Individuals with psychopathic tendencies are sometimes quite capable of acquiring and maintaining leadership positions. One explanation could be that leaders with psychopathic personality profiles “hide behind the mask of sanity” by managing the public display of their emotions so that it positively affects other people's perceptions. We conducted a multisource team study (N = 306 teams) to investigate how leader primary psychopathy and emotion regulation strategies are related to follower perceptions of leader authenticity and follower trust in the leader. We found that leaders with stronger primary psychopathic tendencies would do better to adhere to a strategy of surface acting and refrain from deep acting in order to affect follower trust positively. Perceived authenticity explains the interactive effect of leader emotion regulation and psychopathy on follower trust. We also found that for leaders with higher levels of primary psychopathy deep acting is a less fruitful strategy because they lack the necessary empathic concern, and that the display of naturally felt emotions is a good strategy because it is positively associated with follower trust. We discuss whether the differential use of emotion regulation strategies might explain primary psychopaths’ upward mobility and how their use of emotion regulation strategies could help them to be perceived positively.