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This paper aims to investigate how organizational structure (i.e. centralized hierarchical vs decentralized egalitarian decision-making) can color leadership evaluations of equivalently positioned men and women independent of their actual leadership style. This study addresses three questions: Are men’s leadership abilities, in terms of competence, dominance and interpersonal skills, evaluated more positively than women when they lead a hierarchical company? Are men and women’s leadership abilities evaluated similarly when they lead an egalitarian company? Do organizational outcomes change these effects?

The research performs an eight-condition online vignette experiment on American community college students.

The findings suggest that organizational structure and outcomes influence how male versus female leaders are perceived. When leading a hierarchical company, male leaders not only gain more in perceived leadership ability when their company succeeds but are also less likely to lose legitimacy when their company fails. When leading successful egalitarian organizations, men and women’s leadership skills are thought to gain similar legitimacy, but when an egalitarian organization fails, perceptions of female leaders’ competence, status dominance and interpersonal skills drop more than those of men.

This study’s generalizablity is limited given the sample of participants and the context of the industry utilized in the vignette.

This study suggests that women’s promotion into leadership can be impeded by the decision-making structure of the organizations they lead independent of their individual choice in management style. Women leaders face not only disadvantaged evaluations of their leadership abilities in hierarchical organizations but are also not unilaterally advantaged in egalitarian organizations.

This paper highlights the need to theoretically examine how organizational structures fundamentally embed gender stereotypes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence and development of leadership within the context of new ventures.

A qualitative approach was conducted to analyze in-depth the circumstances under which leadership is emerging and evolving in new ventures. In doing so, 55 founder-CEOs from Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland were interviewed.

The findings suggest that during the development from new ventures to early growth ventures the founder-CEOs and their organizations experience three major transitions. First, the founder-CEOs’ leadership behavior tends to emerge and evolve alongside firm development from being more transformational in new ventures to more transactional in early growth ventures. Second, the decisive employee selection criteria change over time, and the initially important person-founder fit turns into a person-organization fit. Third, a transition from a rather external perspective of the founder-CEOs in the new venture stage to a more internally oriented perspective in the early stages of growth was observed.

Although the findings advance research on leadership in new ventures, the limitations concerning potential recall biases and subjectivism have to be kept in mind.

In practice, the findings imply that the emergence and development of leadership in new ventures should be seen as a dynamic process.

This paper is one of the first to study in-depth the emergence and development of leadership in the context of new ventures.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise how the chief executive officer (CEO) and chairperson of the board (Chair) construct their relationship through their leadership practices, and to analyse the meaning of these practices to the relationship. An empirical investigation from both partners’ viewpoint is conducted.

The data were gathered through in-depth interviews with 16 CEOs and 16 chairpersons from the same companies. Content analysis was used to analyse the data.

Four types of leadership practices in the CEO-Chair relationship were conceptualised: emergent practices on company- and person-related issues, and scheduled practices on company- and person-related issues. For the effectiveness of the relationship, emergent practices on company-related issues seem to be most important.

The basing of the analysis on interviewees’ descriptions rather than on the observation of leadership practices in action can be considered a limitation.

Knowledge of leadership practices in the CEO-Chair relationship and their meaning to the relationship can be utilised in leadership training.

This research contributes to the relational leadership literature by highlighting a specific leadership relationship, the CEO-Chair relationship, from both partners’ viewpoint. Additionally, the value of the study is that it shows that the CEO-Chair relationship is more multifaceted than traditionally assumed in prior literature.

Drawing on the theories of servant leadership and upper echelons, this paper aims to highlight the mechanisms through which CEO servant leadership enhances firm innovativeness in hotels. This study aims to test a multiple mediation model by considering the mediating role of encouragement of participation (EoPART) – a high-performance human resources (HR) practice – and employees’ voice (EVOICE) in sequence.

Data were collected from HR managers of 34 hotels in the hospitality industry in Spain, which represents an important international tourist destination. Two methods of rigorous data analysis were used (partial least squares [PLS], structural equation modeling and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis [fs/QCA]), which enabled robust findings to be produced with minimal sample size requirements.

CEO servant leadership had a positive indirect effect on firm innovativeness in hotels, via the sequential application of EoPART and EVOICE.

The findings provide new HR-related insights regarding the encouragement of firm innovativeness in hotels: CEOs can boost innovativeness in their hotels through the development of EoPART systems, which in turn favor EVOICE.

This is one of the first studies to analyze whether CEO servant leadership has an impact on innovativeness in hotels. Moreover, this study is the first to show the internal mechanisms (EoPART, EVOICE) through which CEO servant leadership encourages hotel innovativeness.

This study proposes and tests a model grounded in resource-based theory to describe how the formal rules embedded in an organization's green human resource management (GHRM) combine with informal cues communicated by members of the firm's upper echelon, including the CEO and members of the top management team (TMT), to affect a firm's environmental performance.

Multi-source data were collected from 240 human resource managers, chief financial officers and CEOs in 80 firms.

The results show that CEO ethical leadership moderates the positive relationship between GHRM and TMT green commitment, which in turn mediates the relationship between GHRM and firms' environmental performance.

The tested importance of CEO ethical leadership as an organizational condition that amplifies the effectiveness of strategically aligned HRM systems offers new theoretical insights to advance HRM scholarship.

The unique cultural and historical background of Chinese firms makes it likely that Western‐based findings on the nature and effects of chief operating officer (CEO) leadership may not generalize to them. Recently, Tsui et al. (2004) have identified four distinct leadership styles among Chinese CEOs based on a set of leadership behaviors that reflect the Chinese cultural framework. They further inferred from an analysis of 25 successful firms that all four leadership styles can be effective in the current Chinese context. The objective of this study is to test the robustness of Tsui et al.'s (2004) findings—especially their inference about leadership styles' effects. Survey data from mid‐ to high‐level managers of 116 listed Chinese firms are combined with these firms' publicly available financial statements. The results strongly support the existence of Tsui et al.'s (2004) four CEO leadership styles. However, they also reveal that leadership style and environmental uncertainty have a significant interaction effect on firm performance. This finding implies that each leadership style's performance effects may be dampened or magnified by select firm characteristics.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether Chief Executive Officers’ (CEOs) discrepant leadership styles are reflected on CEO succession outcomes, operationalised as changes to employee views of the organisation following the succession.

Hypotheses were tested in a sample of 230 employees who completed an online survey at four time points over a three-year period. Linear mixed models analyses tested for significant changes to alignment, participation, learning culture, organisational commitment and engagement perceptions over time. Qualitative data were content-analysed to ascertain the CEOs’ leadership styles and explore employee views of the organisation.

While alignment and participation scores did not significantly increase following the CEO succession, learning culture, organisational commitment and engagement increased significantly.

This study adds to the limited research on CEO succession. It suggests that what renders a succession adaptive or disruptive may be contingent on the leadership styles of outgoing and incoming CEOs.

The transition from a transactional to a transformational CEO may have a stronger impact on motivational and attitudinal outcomes (e.g. engagement) than on operational outcomes (e.g. alignment).

This study is the first to longitudinally examine a range employee outcomes of CEO succession considering the incoming and outgoing CEOs’ discrepant leadership styles. It extends the leadership literature by empirically showing that, despite the disruption underlying a succession event, employee views of the organisation improve significantly following the transition from a transactional to a transformational leader.

This research aims to examine the influence of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) dark triad traits, follower COVID-19 anxiety and self-leadership on follower evaluations of the effectiveness of organizations’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

In this paper data were collected over two time periods. At time 1, mid-October 2021, 650 participants responded to questions on their CEO’s leadership traits and self-leadership. At time 2, (3-week lag) 275 matched individual responses provided followers’ evaluations of the effectiveness of the organization’s COVID-19 response and follower self-leadership.

CEO dark triad traits had direct and indirect negative effects on followers’ evaluations of the organization’s COVID-19 response (through COVID-19 anxiety). Follower self-leadership mitigated the negative effects.

By examining the moderating role of self-leadership, we can offer organizations evidence-based strategies to mitigate some harmful effects of leaders exhibiting dark triad traits.

Given that organizations are still dealing with the ongoing ramifications of COVID-19 and planning for future crises, our findings emphasize the negative effects of dark traits on COVID-19 anxiety, and in turn, on follower’s evaluation of effective organization response to a crisis, highlighting the importance of top-level leader selection.

Our results bolster Manz’s (1986) argument that self-leadership might be key to achieving peak performance in organizations and important for follower well-being.

This study of dark traits is especially important in a crisis context to understand how leaders affect followers’ perceptions about organizational outcomes and factors that might mediate or moderate the negative impact. Despite interest in understanding leadership during a crisis, the majority of research is focused on positive traits of leaders (Palmer et al., 2020).

The purpose of this study is to test the role of familiness-related team forces induced by the CEO of family firms. In particular, we report on the effects of the transformational leadership style of CEOs on their respective top-management team (TMT) and firm performance when viewed through a familiness lens.

Survey measures were taken from a snowballed sample of 72 CEOs of German family firms as well as from 245 members of their TMTs. We tested the aggregated firm-level data with objective performance indicators of the firms they led.

Support was obtained for the three hypothesized team-force mediations and the four-path mediation model. The relationship between CEO’s transformational style and high family-firm performance is found to be serially mediated by TMT cohesion, behavioral integration and efficacy. Together, these three types of collective forces are assumed to be the familiness effect of a family-member CEO with a transformational leadership style.

With our model, we quantitatively tested familiness-type forces vis-à-vis firm performance. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

The current leadership literature has paid little attention to understanding the intervening mechanism by which leaders influence followers. In order to partially bridge this gap, the article aims to present a value‐fit charismatic leadership theory which focusses on the key intervening mechanism – person‐organization values fit.

The model was tested empirically on 180 participants, including 51 managers and 129 employees from 37 large‐scale companies in Taiwan.

Based on the block regression analysis, the results showed that CEO charismatic leadership has both direct and indirect effects on employees’ extra effort to work, satisfaction with the CEO, as well as organizational commitment, which are mediated by employees’ perceived person‐organization values fit. The findings also provided evidence that the relationship between charismatic leadership and person‐organization values fit is significant. Furthermore, the analysis also showed the significant effects of person‐organization values fit on employee outcomes.

The study shows how CEO charismatic leadership can, through the mediating effect of person‐organization values fit, have profound influence on employee outcomes.