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
Cite View Details Read Now Related
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
Cite View Details Find at Harvard Purchase Related
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
Cite View Details Find at Harvard Related
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
Cite View Details Find at Harvard Related
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
Cite View Details Purchase Related

Recent Publications

Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2020 (Revised July 2020)
TraceTogether
Mitchell B. Weiss and Sarah Mehta
By April 7, 2020, over 1.4 million people worldwide had contracted the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Governments raced to curb the spread of COVID-19 by scaling up testing, quarantining those infected, and tracing their possible contacts. It had taken Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech) and Ministry of Health (MOH) all of eight weeks to develop the world’s first nationwide deployment of a Bluetooth-based contact tracing system, TraceTogether, and deploy it in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19. From late January to mid-March 2020, GovTech’s Jason Bay and his team raced to create a technology that would supplement the work of Singapore’s human contact tracers. Days after its launch, Singapore’s foreign minister announced plans to open source the technology. Now, in early April, TraceTogether was a beta for the world. Whether the system would really help in Singapore, and whether other countries should adopt it was still a wide-open question
Keywords: Government Administration; Crisis Management; Health; Health Pandemics; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Leadership; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Social Issues; Technology; Mobile Technology; Software; Technology Adoption; Health Industry; Public Administration Industry; Singapore;

Citation:
Weiss, Mitchell B., and Sarah Mehta. "TraceTogether." Harvard Business School Case 820-111, June 2020. (Revised July 2020.) View Details
Cite View Details Educators Purchase Related
Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2020
Shellye Archambeau: Becoming a CEO (A)
Tsedal Neeley and John Masko
With the economy in a freefall, MetricStream is losing customers, hemorrhaging cash and struggling to make payroll. Several board members are threatening to quit. Others are pressing to sell the company even at dismally low valuations. It’s 2008 and lightning has struck for Shellye Archambeau once again. As CEO of MetricStream, she had spent the last seven years turning a tech startup on life support after the dot-com bust into a market leader of governance, risk, and compliance software for businesses. As a black female CEO, Archambeau is no stranger to adversity. Becoming a leader had been her goal since high school and she had achieved it through decades of hard work and skillful decision making. Now she faces her most critical leadership decision. She calls a meeting with her board chairman, Gunjan Sinha, to discuss the best path forward: Sell MetricStream while offers are on the table, or try to save it by looking for a big customer of the company’s risk management software against the backdrop of the financial crisis? Both options have dire consequences. Valuations are plummeting by the day. Cash is disappearing by the minute. Archambeau and Sinha need to decide and act swiftly.
Keywords: Race; Gender; Leadership Style; Risk and Uncertainty; Change; Prejudice and Bias; Decision Making; Technology Industry; California;

Citation:
Neeley, Tsedal, and John Masko. "Shellye Archambeau: Becoming a CEO (A)." Harvard Business School Case 420-071, June 2020. View Details
Cite View Details Educators Related
Book | 2020
Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You
Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss
When leaders and aspiring leaders seek out advice, they're often told to try harder. Dig deeper. Look in the mirror and own your natural-born strengths and fix any real or perceived career-limiting deficiencies.

We offer a different worldview. We argue that this popular leadership advice glosses over the most important thing you do as a leader: Build others up. Leadership isn’t about you. It’s about how effective you are at empowering other people—and making sure that this impact endures even in your absence. We show through inspiring stories from ancient Rome to Silicon Valley, the origins of great leadership are found, paradoxically, not in worrying about your own status and advancement, but in the unrelenting focus on other people’s potential.

Unleashed provides radical advice for the practice of leadership today. Showing how the boldest, most effective leaders use a special combination of trust, love, and belonging to create spaces where other people can excel, we offer practical, battle-tested tools—based on our work in companies such as Uber, Riot Games, and others—along with interviews and stories from our own personal experience to make these ideas come alive. This book is your indispensable guide for unleashing greatness in other people...and, ultimately, in yourself.
Keywords: leadership skills; belonging; Leadership; Management Skills; Trust; Organizational Culture;

Citation:
Frei, Frances X., and Anne Morriss. Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2020. View Details
Cite View Details Purchase Related
Case | HBS Case Collection | May 2020
Michael Ku and Global Clinical Supply at Pfizer Inc.: Bringing Hope to Patients (A)
Linda A. Hill, Allison J. Wigen and Emily Tedards
Michael Ku joined Pfizer in 2011, after the company had undergone three large-scale mergers and acquisitions. His mission was to drive the digital transformation of the company’s clinical supply chain, but he knew he had to start with the culture. Over the next eight years, Ku and his leadership team put in place the culture, talent, structure, and processes necessary to prime the clinical supply chain for digital transformation. By 2019, the clinical supply chain had made significant progress toward becoming the agile, innovative organization necessary to support Pfizer’s new ambition to focus exclusively on developing innovative medicines and vaccines. Ku knew there was more to be done before they could maximize their digital and innovation efforts. He had asked his leadership team to come up with a proposal to improve decision-making in the organization.
Keywords: innovation; digital; Change; culture; management; Talent; supply chain; Pharmaceutical Companies; customer-centricity; collaboration; cross-functional management; purpose; Leadership; Innovation and Invention; Transformation; Organizational Culture; Change Management; Talent and Talent Management; Customer Focus and Relationships; Supply Chain; Decision Making; Mission and Purpose;

Citation:
Hill, Linda A., Allison J. Wigen, and Emily Tedards. "Michael Ku and Global Clinical Supply at Pfizer Inc.: Bringing Hope to Patients (A)." Harvard Business School Case 420-108, May 2020. View Details
Cite View Details Educators Purchase Related
Case | HBS Case Collection | May 2020
EFM Capital
Victoria Ivashina and Justin Oldroyd
Examples of successful middle-market private equity investments in emerging markets remain very limited. Among the primary constraints are lack of availability of reasonably priced debt capital, limited exit options for private equity capital, and absence of stable and diversified sources of capital for private equity firms. This case follows the founders of EFM Capital, a private equity firm operating in the Mexican middle market, as they navigate said challenges and deliberate the future of their firm. Students will learn about EFM’s unique business model for integrating acquired companies and will follow the co-founders’ thought processes as they evaluate new opportunities both within Mexico and abroad. This case's simple but rich platform allows students to understand the constraints of the traditional private equity model and discuss challenges of having a professional, systematic approach to private equity investments a market like Mexico.
Keywords: investment management; emerging economies; fund management; small and medium-sized enterprises; due diligence; succession; international expansion; Private Equity; Investment; Management; Emerging Markets; Operations; Communication; Leadership; Change Management; Expansion; Business Model; Mexico;

Citation:
Ivashina, Victoria, and Justin Oldroyd. "EFM Capital." Harvard Business School Case 220-090, May 2020. View Details
Cite View Details Educators Purchase Related
Article | Harvard Business Review Digital Articles | May 6, 2020
We Shouldn't Wait for a Breakthrough in the Covid-19 Pandemic
Gary P. Pisano
The ultimate solutions to the Covid-19 crisis may be big breakthroughs in building massive test and trace capacity and developing vaccines and drug remedies. But in the meantime, we should not ignore the potential cumulative impact of the many small things we already know how to do or might try that together could make a big dent in the current crisis. Big problems typically get tackled through a series of small solutions, each of which on its own may not seem particularly important but that together can have a huge impact. Creating and implementing a “small steps” strategy, however, will require strong leadership.
Keywords: COVID-19; Health Pandemics; Strategy; Leadership;

Citation:
Pisano, Gary P. "We Shouldn't Wait for a Breakthrough in the Covid-19 Pandemic." Harvard Business Review Digital Articles (May 6, 2020). View Details
Cite View Details Find at Harvard Read Now Related
Article | AEA Papers and Proceedings | May 2020
Tackling Climate Change Requires Organizational Purpose
Rebecca Henderson and George Serafeim
Unchecked climate change presents a profound threat to economic growth and political stability but despite widespread public concern about the issue, global emissions of greenhouse gases have not declined. Indeed current “business as usual” predictions imply that average global temperatures will rise by more than 4⁰C by 2100, with potentially catastrophic results. In this paper, we argue that while putting in place an effective regime for pricing GHG emissions is more essential than ever, it is unlikely to be sufficient. It is in this context that we hypothesize that increasing the fraction of commercial firms who are “authentically purpose-driven” might have a very significant effect on the problem of climate change.
Keywords: corporate purpose; purpose; sustainability; environment; Climate Change; Organizations; Mission and Purpose; Environmental Sustainability; Strategy; Leadership;

Citation:
Henderson, Rebecca, and George Serafeim. "Tackling Climate Change Requires Organizational Purpose." AEA Papers and Proceedings 110 (May 2020): 177–180. View Details
Cite View Details Read Now Related
Article | Top Sales Magazine | May 2020
Sales Leadership During and After the Crisis
Frank V. Cespedes
Because customer acquisition and retention are the lifeblood of a for-profit enterprise, sales activities establish foundational conditions for a business. In turn, sales managers’ responsibilities in a crisis extend beyond keeping the lights on. Their leadership makes a difference across the business because, for better or worse, selling always affects core drivers like cash flow, cross-functional asset allocations in response to closed sales, and post-sale services, among others. This article discusses three areas where sales managers typically have the most influence in affecting how their companies navigate the current crisis.
Keywords: Sales; Leadership; Health Pandemics; Crisis Management;

Citation:
Cespedes, Frank V. "Sales Leadership During and After the Crisis." Top Sales Magazine (May 2020), 28–29. View Details
Cite View Details Read Now Related
Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2020
Cockpit Dynamics in Air France 447 and United 232
Amy C. Edmondson and Joshua Raymond
This case compares leadership and team dynamics between the cockpit crews in two renowned passenger airline crashes, twenty years apart: Air France 447 in 2009 and United 232 in 1989. The key dimensions of difference across the cases include organization and task sharing in the cockpit, leadership, the application of established procedures, ability to improvise to create new procedures, the type and quality of team communication, and the outcomes. Both flights encountered unexpected malfunctions; in one, teamwork and problem solving failed badly; in the other, the team collaborated extraordinarily well to try to solve the problem. The case discussion will focus on factors that enable effective teamwork under stress, the organizational conditions that lay the foundation for such teamwork, and the conditions under which dissent is vital to effective performance.
Keywords: teams; Team Launch; Crisis Management; Groups and Teams; Leadership; Communication; Air Transportation Industry;

Citation:
Edmondson, Amy C., and Joshua Raymond. "Cockpit Dynamics in Air France 447 and United 232." Harvard Business School Case 620-127, April 2020. View Details
Cite View Details Educators Related
Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020
Corporate Resilience and Response During COVID-19
Alex Cheema-Fox, Bridget LaPerla, George Serafeim and Hui (Stacie) Wang
The coronavirus pandemic caused a sharp market decline while raising heterogeneous responses across companies related to their employees, supply chain, and repurposing of operations to provide needed products and services. We study whether during the 2020 COVID-19 induced market crash, investors differentiated across companies based on their human capital, supply chain, and products and service response. Using data derived from natural language processing applied to news coverage of corporate responses to the coronavirus crisis for 3,023 companies around the world, we find that more positive sentiment around a company’s response is associated with less negative returns. This is especially true for companies with more salient responses and in industries that those responses are more likely to represent a more credible commitment to their stakeholders.
Keywords: COVID-19; coronavirus; crisis response plans; crisis; ESG; ESG (environmental, social, governance) performance; ESG ratings; Leadership & Corporate Accountability; big data; Machine learning; investor behavior; Institutional investors; Corporate performance; Health Pandemics; Crisis Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Human Capital; Supply Chain; Operations; Leadership; Corporate Accountability; Performance;

Citation:
Cheema-Fox, Alex, Bridget LaPerla, George Serafeim, and Hui (Stacie) Wang. "Corporate Resilience and Response During COVID-19." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-108, April 2020. (Revised June 2020.) View Details
Cite View Details SSRN Read Now Related

See all faculty publications on Leadership »

Faculty & Research

Featured Works

Authentic Leadership Development

Real Estate Programs

Initiatives & Projects

Faculty

HBS Working Knowledge

Harvard Business Publishing