Skip to Main Content
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Giving
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions
Faculty & Research
  • Faculty
  • Research
  • Featured Topics
  • Academic Units
  • …→
  • Harvard Business School→
  • Faculty & Research→
Publications
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
ShareBar

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

    • Harvard Business Review

    As the World Shifts, So Should Leaders

    By: Nitin Nohria
    • August 2021 (Revised January 2022)
    • Faculty Research

    Danaher Corporation (Abridged)

    By: Bharat Anand, David J. Collis and Sophie Hood
    • March 2021
    • Faculty Research

    P.F. Chang's

    By: Ashish Nanda, Nitin Nohria and Margaret Cross
More from the Authors
  • As the World Shifts, So Should Leaders By: Nitin Nohria
  • Danaher Corporation (Abridged) By: Bharat Anand, David J. Collis and Sophie Hood
  • P.F. Chang's By: Ashish Nanda, Nitin Nohria and Margaret Cross
ǁ
Campus Map
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
→Map & Directions
→More Contact Information
  • Make a Gift
  • Site Map
  • Jobs
  • Harvard University
  • Trademarks
  • Policies
  • Accessibility
  • Digital Accessibility
Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College