Leadership

Leadership is a featured research topic and an initiative at Harvard Business School.

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.

Featured Works

Chapter | The Rise of HR | 2015
Leave No Slice of Genius Behind: Selecting and Developing Tomorrow's Leaders of Innovation
Linda A. Hill
More than ever, leaders of nearly every kind of organization view their human resources teams as essential to institutional well-being and long-term growth and sustainability. That's the central and animating theme of "The Rise of HR: Wisdom from 73 Thought Leaders," a new anthology published by the HR Certification Institute. Professor Hill's essay addresses the question of how to develop leadership talent capable of building and sustaining organizations that can innovate time and again to address the challenges we face as a global community.
Keywords: innovation; human resources; talent management; talent development and retention; leadership; Innovation Leadership; Human Resources; Talent and Talent Management; Leadership; Leadership Development;

Citation:
Hill, Linda A. "Leave No Slice of Genius Behind: Selecting and Developing Tomorrow's Leaders of Innovation." In The Rise of HR: Wisdom from 73 Thought Leaders, edited by Dave Ulrich, William A. Schiemann, and Libby Sartain, 233–240. Alexandria, VA: HR Certification Institute, 2015. View Details
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Article | JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association
Professionalism, Fiduciary Duty, and Health-Related Business Leadership
Joshua D. Margolis
Expanding fiduciary duty to leaders of health-related businesses can help leaders meet the challenges of caring for not only the corporation and shareholders but also the patients and medical professionals. How should leaders of health-related businesses weigh the demand for efficiency and profit alongside the care of patients and the professional development of physicians? How might physicians approach these leadership roles to withstand the pressures that can divert behavior away from the espoused purposes and ethical standards of medicine?

Citation:
Margolis, Joshua D. "Professionalism, Fiduciary Duty, and Health-Related Business Leadership." JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association 313, no. 18 (May 12, 2015): 1819–1820. View Details
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Article | Harvard Business Review | July–August 2014
How the Other Fukushima Plant Survived
Ranjay Gulati, Charles Casto and Charlotte Krontiris
In March 2011, Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was devastated by three reactor explosions and two core meltdowns in the days following a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami that produced waves as high as 17 meters. The world is familiar with Daiichi's fate; less well known is the crisis at its sister plant, Daini, about 10 kilometers to the south. As a result of nature's onslaught, three of Daini's four reactors lacked sufficient power to achieve cooldown. To prevent the disaster experienced up north, the site superintendent, Naohiro Masuda, and his team had to connect them to the plant's surviving power sources. In a volatile environment, Masuda and Daini's hundreds of employees responded to each unexpected event in turn. Luck played a part, but so did smart leadership and sensemaking. Until the last reactor went into cold shutdown, Masuda's team took nothing for granted. With each new problem they encountered, it recalibrated, iteratively creating continuity and restoring order. Daini survived the crisis without an explosion or a meltdown.

Citation:
Gulati, Ranjay, Charles Casto, and Charlotte Krontiris. "How the Other Fukushima Plant Survived." Harvard Business Review 92, nos. 7/8 (July–August 2014): 111–115. View Details
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Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2018
Do Managers Matter? A Natural Experiment from 42 R&D Labs in India
Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Christos A. Makridis
This paper exploits a natural experiment in the entry of new lab managers across India’s 42 public R&D labs between 1995 and 2006 to study the complementarity between lab managers and incentive schemes. While scientists were provided with stronger incentives to patent and license from multinational companies in 1994, the “old generation” of lab managers disagreed with these aims and failed to adequately support scientists’ efforts. First, we show that the introduction of new lab managers aligned with the national R&D reforms is associated with a 58% rise in patenting and 75% rise in licensing revenues from multinationals. Second, using additional information on each scientist in these labs, we examine how their research productivity changed in response to different managers. Notably, we find that the entry of new lab managers is associated with improved research productivity: 15.6% higher h-indices, 11.7% more coauthors, 12.7% more research articles, and 25.1% more citations per scientist. Moreover, using natural language processing (NLP) techniques on the set of research abstracts produced among these scientists, we find that overall mood and sentiment increased by 9.4% following the first managerial change. Our results highlight the important complementarities between incentives and management practices, especially in developing countries. A back-of-the-envelope calculation that suggests India could save on 9–24% of its R&D and related subsidy expenditures under the entry of new generation lab managers.
Keywords: incentives; innovation; management; productivity; Research and Development; Patents; Leadership; State Ownership; Research and Development; Innovation and Management; Performance Productivity; India;

Citation:
Choudhury, Prithwiraj, Tarun Khanna, and Christos A. Makridis. "Do Managers Matter? A Natural Experiment from 42 R&D Labs in India." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 14-077, February 2014. (Revised June 2018.) View Details
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Article | Harvard Business Review | October 2014
The Transparency Trap
Ethan Bernstein
To get people to be more creative and productive, managers increase transparency with open workspaces and access to real-time data. But less transparent work environments can yield more-transparent employees. Employees perform better when they can try out new ideas and approaches within certain zones of privacy. Organizations allow them to do that by drawing four types of boundaries: around teams of people (zones of attention), between feedback and evaluation (zones of judgment), between decision rights and improvement rights (zones of slack), and for set periods of experimentation (zones of time). By balancing transparency and privacy, organizations can encourage just the right amount of "deviance" to foster innovative behavior and boost productivity.

Citation:
Bernstein, Ethan. "The Transparency Trap." Harvard Business Review 92, no. 10 (October 2014): 58–66. View Details
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Module Note | March 2015
Power and Influence in Society
Julie Battilana
This module aims to help students understand how power and influence are employed, both to reproduce the status quo and to effect change in society. It first helps them to understand why, more often than not, power is used to reproduce the existing way individuals and organizations operate in society. It then highlights what it takes to implement societal change. This includes a wide variety of initiatives ranging from attempts to change individuals' and organizations' behaviors in a given industry or sector, to efforts to change behaviors throughout a country, region, or even the world. Addressing the issue of power and influence in society in an MBA classroom is critical, especially at a time like now, when the relationship between business and society is attracting increasing attention, and when business leaders are increasingly expected to contribute not only to financial value creation, but also to social value creation. In this context, it is important to prepare business school students to lead not just in their organizations, but more broadly in society. Meeting this aspiration requires equipping them with knowledge and tools that will enable them to understand what it takes to have a positive impact in the world. In line with this objective, this module note focuses on how leaders who are not part of government or other public agencies can spark, organize, and/or guide action to bring about change at the societal level.

Citation:
Battilana, Julie. "Power and Influence in Society." Harvard Business School Module Note 415-055, March 2015. View Details
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Recent Publications

Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2018
Zenefits Board of Directors (A)
Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
In early 2018, the time seemed right for Zenefits investor and director Lars Dalgaard to reflect on whether Zenefits had the right board of directors to shepherd the company through its next stages of growth. For the company whose name combined the words “benefits,” reflecting its human resources technology products, and “zen,” loosely defined as a state of calm, the past few years were not entirely zen. Once heralded as one of the fastest growing software start-ups ever, the 5-year old company quickly achieved “unicorn” status—a term given to an elite handful of privately-held start-ups valued at $1 billion or more. But leadership and legal issues that emerged in 2015 had threatened to undermine its success and compelled Zenefits to appoint new board members, hire new executives, reformulate its business model, and transform its corporate culture and philosophy. With those changes in place, Dalgaard now turned his attention once again to the board. Did Zenefits have the board it needed to navigate the next stages of growth as it sought to further distance itself from its rocky past and focus on its future potential?
Keywords: Ethics; Business Model; Corporate Accountability; Governing and Advisory Boards; Corporate Governance; Crisis Management; Entrepreneurship; Human Resources; Leadership; Risk Management; Venture Capital; Technology Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States; California;

Citation:
Paine, Lynn S., and Will Hurwitz. "Zenefits Board of Directors (A)." Harvard Business School Case 319-034, October 2018. View Details
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Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2018
Phuc Huynh and Teach for Vietnam (A)
Leslie Perlow and Eunice Eun
This Harvard Business School case is about Harvard Kennedy School graduate, Phuc Huynh, who wants to establish Teach for Vietnam (TFV) in his home country and become an official Teach for All partner. It considers the concepts of giving back in one’s career and the process of deciding whether to give up on a seemingly unattainable goal or whether to persevere and follow through on a dream, despite multiple obstacles.
Keywords: Vietnam; Asia; Giving Back; Career Decisions; Education; Social Entrepreneurship; Personal Development and Career; Mission and Purpose; Leadership Development; Education Industry; Viet Nam; Asia;

Citation:
Perlow, Leslie, and Eunice Eun. "Phuc Huynh and Teach for Vietnam (A)." Harvard Business School Case 419-036, October 2018. View Details
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Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2018
African Bank Investments Limited (A)
Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
Less than a year after joining the board of African Bank Investments Limited (ABIL), the newest director finds himself in difficult discussions with other directors about removing the struggling company’s CEO. The case is set in South Africa in mid-2014 as shares in ABIL, which traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, are declining precipitously. The case describes ABIL’s origins and evolution, including the acquisition and growth of its wholly owned subsidiary African Bank, a provider of unsecured loans to help individuals pay for expenses such as vehicle repairs, home renovations, funeral costs, medical bills, and education. As ABIL’s profits rose and share price soared, it became the darling of analysts. However, when the South African economy turned sour, customers started defaulting on their loans, and ABIL and African Bank began to struggle. As ABIL’s stock price dropped, the management team faced difficult questions about the company’s lending practices, risk management processes, and plans to turn the business around. By 2014, the situation was grim, and pressure mounted from shareholders and market regulators for the board to take action. The case details the history of unsecured lending in South Africa, describes the regulatory, social, and legal contexts for the company and its business model, and explores the company’s unique corporate structure and executive and director dynamics.
Keywords: Ethics; Personal Finance; Corporate Accountability; Governing and Advisory Boards; Corporate Governance; Crisis Management; Insurance; Leadership; Management; Risk Management; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Insurance Industry; Africa; South Africa;

Citation:
Paine, Lynn S., and Will Hurwitz. "African Bank Investments Limited (A)." Harvard Business School Case 319-052, October 2018. View Details
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Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2018 (Revised November 2018)
The Boston Beer Company: Managing the Bullwhip
Christina R. Wing and Marco Iansiti
Keywords: Beer/brewing industry; supply chain; succession; Leadership; Change; Supply Chain; United States;

Citation:
Wing, Christina R., and Marco Iansiti. "The Boston Beer Company: Managing the Bullwhip." Harvard Business School Case 619-021, October 2018. (Revised November 2018.) View Details
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Article | Management Science | October 2018
Strategy and the Strategist: How it Matters Who Develops the Strategy
Eric J. Van den Steen
This paper addresses primarily two questions. First, when (and why) should a company’s strategy be developed by its CEO versus by some outside analyst or other insider? Second, how does strategy interact with vision (in the sense of a strong belief about the right course of action)? The paper studies these questions using a functional definition of strategy as “the smallest set of choices to optimally guide other choices.” Among other things, the paper shows that strategy formulation by the CEO leads to both better strategy and better execution, and that a strategist’s vision may improve execution. In the process, the paper also identifies criteria that make a decision strategic and derives explanations why strategies often reflect the background of the strategist.
Keywords: strategy; strategy and leadership; strategy and execution; Strategy; Leadership;

Citation:
Van den Steen, Eric J. "Strategy and the Strategist: How it Matters Who Develops the Strategy." Management Science 64, no. 10 (October 2018): 4533–4551. View Details
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Case | HBS Case Collection | September 2018
An Innovative Anti-bribery Commitment?
Eugene Soltes
A company commits to providing investors a 200% return on their investment if either the firm or its founder is investigated for corruption.
Keywords: Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; United Kingdom Bribery Act; Law; Leadership; Moral Sensibility; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry; United States; United Kingdom; Asia;

Citation:
Soltes, Eugene. "An Innovative Anti-bribery Commitment?" Harvard Business School Case 119-039, September 2018. View Details
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Article | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | August 28, 2018
How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence
Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore and David Lazer
People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a reduction in individual exploration for novel answers) relative to independent problem solving. In contrast to prior work, which has focused on how the presence and network structure of social influence affect performance, here we investigate the effects of time. We show that when social influence is intermittent it provides the benefits of constant social influence without the costs. Human subjects solved the canonical traveling salesperson problem in groups of three, randomized into treatments with constant social influence, intermittent social influence, or no social influence. Groups in the intermittent social-influence treatment found the optimum solution frequently (like groups without influence) but had a high mean performance (like groups with constant influence); they learned from each other, while maintaining a high level of exploration. Solutions improved most on rounds with social influence after a period of separation. We also show that storing subjects’ best solutions so that they could be reloaded and possibly modified in subsequent rounds—a ubiquitous feature of personal productivity software—is similar to constant social influence: it increases mean performance but decreases exploration.
Keywords: transparency; social influence; Collective Intelligence; Interaction; problem solving; collaboration; intermittant; Breaks; always on; communication technologies; communication; Communication; Design; Information; Management; Leadership; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Performance; Social and Collaborative Networks; Information Technology;

Citation:
Bernstein, Ethan, Jesse Shore, and David Lazer. "How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115, no. 35 (August 28, 2018). View Details
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Case | HBS Case Collection | August 2018
Christine Lagarde
Julie Battilana, Carin-Isabel Knoop, Vanessa Ampelas and Noemie Assenat
For a modular presentation of the same material, please see “Christine Lagarde (A): A French Prime Minister Calls” (HBS No. 419-017), “Christine Lagarde (B): Being a Public Servant” (HBS No. 419-018), and “Christine Lagarde (C): Managing the IMF” (HBS No. 419-019). These full-length cases describe various stages of Christine Lagarde's career. They are stand-alone cases that can also be used over several classes. The entire series, including its video products, was designed to be modular. The case covers the youth and career trajectory of Christine Lagarde across her time at Baker & McKenzie, as a minister in the government of France, and as the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The case highlights the challenges and opportunities she faced during each phase of her career and how she managed them. Lagarde started her career in 1981 as a lawyer at the global law firm Baker & McKenzie, which employed approximately 2,500 lawyers across 35 countries by 1999, when she became the firm's first non-American and female chairman. In 2005, she became France's Minister for Foreign Trade in President Jacques Chirac's administration and was the EU's de facto finance minister when the financial crisis was most acute. In 2011, she was selected to head the IMF. Since 2011, Lagarde worked to build the foundation for the IMF's adaptation to the realities of the 21st century. By 2017, shortly after Lagarde began her second term as the managing director of the IMF, the world faced both opportunities and challenges as a result of the rapidly evolving, hyper-connected global economy, including deeper cross-border integration, the rise of emerging economies, technological change, and growing wealth and income inequality within countries. These interrelated dynamics were playing out alongside heightened anxiety within the populations of some major advanced economies about what these changes meant for them. The concerns manifested themselves in an inward focus, rumblings of protectionism, and questions about the worth of international cooperation and the multilateral system itself. Lagarde believed that the challenges facing the world economy warranted not less but more global cooperation. In this context, she had to determine how the IMF—as the leading advocate of global economic cooperation since its creation—could better demonstrate its effectiveness. She knew that it was a critical moment.
Keywords: power and influence; leadership; gender; Change; Personal Development and Career; Power and Influence; Leadership; Gender; Leading Change;

Citation:
Battilana, Julie, Carin-Isabel Knoop, Vanessa Ampelas, and Noemie Assenat. "Christine Lagarde." Harvard Business School Case 419-016, August 2018. View Details
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Article | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences
The Impact of the 'Open' Workspace on Human Collaboration
Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban
Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into “open,” transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors, and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes. In two intervention-based field studies of corporate headquarters transitioning to more open office spaces, we empirically examined—using digital data from advanced wearable devices and from electronic communication servers—the effect of open office architectures on employees' face-to-face, email, and instant messaging (IM) interaction patterns. Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM. This is the first study to empirically measure both face-to-face and electronic interaction before and after the adoption of open office architecture. The results inform our understanding of the impact on human behavior of workspaces that trend toward fewer spatial boundaries.
Keywords: Open Office; transparency; collaboration; Collective Intelligence; workspace; workspace design; architecture; cubicles; boundaries; spatial boundaries; Human behavior; propinquity; co-location; Interaction; sociometers; people analytics; Buildings and Facilities; Communication; Design; Human Resources; Leadership; Management; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Networks; Social and Collaborative Networks; Technology; United States;

Citation:
Bernstein, Ethan, and Stephen Turban. "The Impact of the 'Open' Workspace on Human Collaboration." Art. 239. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences 373, no. 1753 (August 19, 2018). View Details
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Case | HBS Case Collection | August 2018
Alvogen: Scaling Entrepreneurship
Daniel Isenberg, William R. Kerr and Alexis Brownell
Keywords: Pharmaceutical Companies; Iceland; entrepreneurship; scaling; leadership; generic drugs; Entrepreneurship; Leadership; Pharmaceutical Industry; Asia; Europe; United States; Iceland;

Citation:
Isenberg, Daniel, William R. Kerr, and Alexis Brownell. "Alvogen: Scaling Entrepreneurship." Harvard Business School Case 819-038, August 2018. View Details
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