Publications
Publications
- 2015
- HBS Working Paper Series
Making a Difference: Leader Evaluation, Selection, and Impact
By: Gautam Mukunda
Abstract
The relationship between leader selection and impact is important to both researchers and practitioners. This paper introduces Leader Filtration Theory (LFT)—a theory from political science—to managerial audiences, applies it to organizations, and uses it to improve our understanding of leader selection and impact. While traditional theories of leader selection describe organizations as picking leaders with particular characteristics, LFT sees organizations as having a filtration process that evaluates a pool of candidates and iteratively removes them from the pool, with the odds of removal increasing the less similar a candidate is to a hypothetical ideal leader. The better the filtration process evaluates candidates, the more homogenous the pool becomes and the more similar the selected leader and the ideal leader are likely to be. Thoroughness of evaluation has three determinants: how much information exists about a candidate; how much of that information is accessible to organizational elites; and how heavily that information was weighted in the selection of the next leader. Individual, organizational, and contextual factors interact to influence these three determinants. Less evaluated leaders are likely to vary more in performance, produce more outlier performances, innovate more, and change their organizations more than highly evaluated ones.
Keywords
Citation
Mukunda, Gautam. "Making a Difference: Leader Evaluation, Selection, and Impact." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 15-074, May 2015.