Leadership
Leadership
As our world grows increasingly global, intricate, and ever-changing, the role of leaders is becoming more and more complex and critical to business success. In the 1950s and 1960s, Fritz Roethlisberger and Elton Mayo's contributions to the "Hawthorne effect," and work by Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch on organizational integration, sparked the field of Organizational Behavior. Early work by Michael Beer on leading organizational change, Rosabeth Kanter on innovation for productivity, John Kotter on power and influence, and Michael Tushman on innovation management helped shape today's understanding of organizational transformation. With an interest in Leadership that spans our academic units, our approach to research is collaborative and multi-disciplinary. We leverage a wide range of research methodologies – from onsite field research to surveys, experiments, and extensive longitudinal studies.
Leadership Initiative
The Leadership Initiative undertakes cutting-edge research and course development projects about leadership and leadership development, both within HBS and through collaborations with other organizations.
LeadershipRecent Publications
Vanderbilt: Transforming an Academic Health Care Delivery System, 2020
- August 2023 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Reimagining Hindustan Unilever (A)
- August 2023 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Raymond Jefferson: Trial by Fire
- July 2023 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Schuberg Philis: From Success to Significance
- July 2023 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Ferrari: Shifting to Carbon Neutrality
- May 2023 (Revised July 2023) |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Novartis (A): Reimagining Medicine
- May 2023 (Revised June 2023) |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
IBM’s Ginni Rometty: Leading with Good Power
- May 2023 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Dena Almansoori at e&: Fostering Culture Change at a UAE Telco Transforming to a Global Techco (Abridged)
- April 2023 (Revised July 2023) |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Dena Almansoori at e&: Fostering Culture Change at a UAE Telco Transforming to a Global Techco
- April 2023 (Revised July 2023) |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
Christiana Figueres and the Collaborative Approach to Negotiating Climate Action
- 2023 |
- Case |
- Faculty Research
As UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Christiana Figueres was tasked with a seemingly insurmountable challenge of putting together an impactful, global climate agreement. Coming out of the dramatic failure of the Copenhagen summit five years before, many believed that such an agreement was not possible. However, with persistent optimism and careful, targeted interventions aimed at building momentum, in 2015 the Paris Agreement was adopted by the 196 participating nations and set forth a new global consensus framework for international climate action.
Figueres had to personally undergo a transformation to let go of her identity as a Costa Rican diplomat so she could approach the negotiations from a global perspective and meet each participating nation from their perspective. The negotiation process itself was not just the two-week conference in Paris but instead was a years-long series of actions “away from the table" taken by Figueres and others to help enhance the probability of a successful outcome at the negotiating table. These actions included coalition building discussions with private industry and civil society groups, like-minded nations, in which small teams of strategic influencers worked with partners behind the scenes to build support for an ambitious outcome. By bringing different coalitions of countries and non-state actors together to lead the way, a more expansive agreement became possible.