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Publications
  • 2010
  • Chapter
  • Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice

When Does Leadership Matter? A Contingent Opportunities View of CEO Leadership

By: Noam Wasserman, Nitin Nohria and Bharat Anand
  • Format:Print
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Abstract

There is by now a long-standing debate on the impact that CEOs have on company performance. Studies of leadership describe how CEOs can significantly impact company performance, while the "constraints" perspective argues that leaders are sufficiently constrained by their environments, and that their ability to impact performance is limited. This paper seeks to alter the framing of this debate by asking, instead, "When does leadership matter?" We develop a "contingent opportunities" theory of leadership and empirically examine our predictions on a dataset of 531 companies from 42 industries from 1979 to 1997. We show that CEO impact differs markedly by industry, and that CEOs have the most significant impact where opportunities are scarce or where CEOs have slack resources.

Keywords

Business Ventures; Leadership; Performance Improvement; Research; Opportunities

Citation

Wasserman, Noam, Nitin Nohria, and Bharat Anand. "When Does Leadership Matter? A Contingent Opportunities View of CEO Leadership." Chap. 2 in Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice, edited by Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana. Harvard Business Press, 2010.

About The Authors

Nitin Nohria

→More Publications

Bharat N. Anand

Strategy
→More Publications

More from the Authors

    • 2021
    • Strategic Management Review

    The Virtues and Limitations of Dynamic Capabilities

    By: Bharat Anand and David J. Collis
    • 2018
    • Faculty Research

    The Limitations of Dynamic Capabilities

    By: David J. Collis and Bharat Anand
    • July–August 2018
    • Harvard Business Review

    How CEOs Manage Time

    By: Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria
More from the Authors
  • The Virtues and Limitations of Dynamic Capabilities By: Bharat Anand and David J. Collis
  • The Limitations of Dynamic Capabilities By: David J. Collis and Bharat Anand
  • How CEOs Manage Time By: Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria
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