A recent paper in the journal Leadership Quarterly explores the very nature of leadership styles and how they play out, ultimately asserting that: "the common finding that positive leadership styles lead to positive outcomes […] might be an artifact of conflation rather than a reflection of reality” (p. 1).

Yet what are positive leadership styles and why have generations of leadership researchers so badly misinterpreted their impact?

Joining me on the Brain for Business podcast to discuss the findings of the paper is one of its co-authors, Professor Thomas Fischer of the University of Geneva.

About Thomas Fischer

Thomas Fischer is an Associate Professor at the University of Geneva and is the Yearly Review Editor of The Leadership Quarterly, the premier journal fully dedicated to leadership research. Thomas Fischer’s work focuses on managing people in organizations, and in particular on two topics. First, the conceptualization and measurement of leadership styles. Second, how people talk about their own leadership and whether their practice lives up to what they preach.

Details of the articles discussed in the podcast are as follows:

• Fischer, T., Dietz, J., & Antonakis, J. (2024). A fatal flaw: Positive leadership style research creates causal illusions. The Leadership Quarterly, 101771. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984323000978
• Fischer, T. (2023). Measuring behaviors counterfactually. The Leadership Quarterly, 34(6), 101750. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984323000760
• Fischer, T., & Sitkin, S. B. (2023). Leadership styles: A comprehensive assessment and way forward. Academy of Management Annals, 17(1), 331-372. https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/annals.2020.0340
• Alvesson, M., & Blom, M. (2022). The hegemonic ambiguity of big concepts in organization studies. Human Relations, 75(1), 58-86. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0018726720986847

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A recent article in the journal Organization Science argues that

“Although prior research attributes news media coverage of firms to the alignment of firm behavior with societal expectations of appropriateness, the appropriateness of firm behavior is judged through an ideological lens. Therefore, the influence of a firm’s behavior on its news media coverage is likely to be contingent on news organizations’ ideology.”

The veracity of this statement has seemingly never been more true than in recent years when the news media has become increasingly polarised along ideological grounds and there would at times appear to be a news outlet to support any view, however mainstream or obscure.

To explore this further I am delighted be joined by one of the co-authors of the paper, Professor Georg Wernicke of HEC Paris.

About our guest…

Georg Wernicke is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Business Policy at HEC Paris. Georg’s research is on topics in, and at the intersection of, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR), broadly defined. More specifically, he is interested in the drivers of public disapproval of firms’ practices, for example the compensation firms pay to their CEOs, how firms’ prosocial activities affect disapproval, and, in turn, which subset of firms and CEOs reacts to being targeted. Georg also analyzes how the characteristics and values of CEOs affect firm level outcomes such as corporate misconduct or the adoption of prosocial practices, as well as how demographic minority status affects labor-market outcomes for directors after occurrences of financial fraud. Furthermore, Georg engages in projects that explore the antecedents of superior firm performance on CSR.

• The article referenced in the discussion is available here: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.2022.17237
• You can find out more about Georg and his work at his personal page: https://www.georg-wernicke.com/
• Or on his faculty page at HEC Paris: https://www.hec.edu/en/faculty-research/faculty-directory/faculty-member/WERNICKE-Georg

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Innovation is an inherently risky business. When we push the boundaries of possibility and try to develop new products, processes or services, we are by definition moving into areas that are new and unexplored. A key consequence of this is that innovation sometimes – or even often – results in failure. But why is this? And are all innovation failures the same?

To explore this further, I am delighted to be joined by Dr Elena Freisinger who, together with Professor Ian McCarthy of Simon Fraser University, has recently published on just this topic.

About our guest…

Elena Freisinger is an Assistant Professor of Innovation Management at Ilmenau University of Technology in Thuringia, Germany.

Elena’s research focuses on the behavioral aspects of Innovation Management, and she investigates the behavior of innovation decision-makers with regard to technological and environmental change and how this affects innovation management and business models of organizations.

The article discussed is open access and can be downloaded from here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166497224000452

You can find out more about Elena and her research here:

• https://www.tu-ilmenau.de/en/universitaet/fakultaeten/fakultaet-wirtschaftswissenschaften-und-medien/profil/institute-und-fachgebiete/fachgebiet-innovationsmanagement/team/elena-freisinger
• https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=N1Qp6bcAAAAJ&hl=de

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