Research

In partnership with Oliver Wyman Leadership Development, CLST conducted 45 interviews with financial analysts around the globe to learn how the strength or quality of leadership plays into the analysts’ evaluation of the firm. We discovered that estimating the quality of leadership was even more important in companies and industry sectors with substantially higher degrees of strategic freedom and controls to make decisions impacting a firm’s performance. In a follow-up study, working with Forbes research and surveying 305 financial analysts around the globe, the initial findings noted above have now been corroborated and expanded. The net result is that analysts’ evaluation of leadership indeed matters and can account for 20% or more of the changes in their estimation of a firm’s value.

Recently, the CLST worked with several researchers around the world to examine if emergent entrepreneurial leadership was heritable. What we discovered was that for males entrepreneurial leadership had zero heritability considering the entire working life-span, while for women it was near 50%. The authors speculated that the high heritability associated with women entrepreneurs is likely due to potential biases in business against woman entrepreneurs. Specifically, certain traits that help woman to be successful today, may become less important over time, moving the overall amount of heritability associated with being an entrepreneurial leader down closer to males

We are completing a 90 country study of over 200 manufacturing facilities around the world. We measured the leadership of each of these manufacturing units in terms of their authentic leadership and then followed up to get measures of employee voice, commitment, unit productivity, water usage in manufacturing, electric usage and waste. We found that manufacturing plants led by leaders who were rated as being more authentic by their followers, had employees who felt their voice or opinions were heard, were more committed to the organization and innovation, had more productive facilities, which also had a more positive impact on their environment—lower waste, water usage and electricity.

Employees are important stakeholders of firms because they are directly engaged in strategy implementation, and thus are critical to firm success. Accordingly, we theorize that employees’ views can impact the assessment of CEOs by boards of directors beyond firm financial performance and security analysts’ recommendations. Specifically, we hypothesized that employee approval of a CEO’s leadership is predictive of a board’s CEO dismissal decision, particularly when there is relatively higher firm financial performance, more positive security analyst recommendations, and lower CEO power. Using longitudinal data from 338 firms and 1,252 firm-year observations between 2010 and 2018, we found empirical support for the above predictions. Our theory and supportive findings have important implications for research and practice regarding employee/stakeholder engagement, strategic leadership, and corporate governance.

Evaluations of Firms.* Although holding oneself accountable is deemed important for effective leadership, CEOs tend to demonstrate a self-serving tendency when reporting their company’s performance to the financial community. Leaders do so by providing internal accounts for favorable performance and external accounts for unfavorable performance. The effects of this strategy on the financial community’s judgments of a company’s value, however, is frequently mixed. Guided by the actor-observer perspective, we propose that observers (i.e., analysts) are likely to provide higher forecasts for firms whose CEOs attribute unfavorable organizational outcomes to internal factors like themselves, and favorable outcome.

A Sound Health Care Project
This research project goal is to understand how effective strategic change initiates, unfolds and sustains over time in healthcare organizations, so that we can then teach how to replicate successful strategic change at the least cost with the maximum impact on performance. During 2010-2011, we examined a select set of 10 hospitals in the Puget Sound region to study how these hospital systems engage in major strategic change, such as improving patient flow, enhancing safety or the digitization of patient records.

Combat Leadership Project
Working in collaboration with the US Army and the US Army’s Center for the Army Profession and Ethic (CAPE), CLST researchers have been studying how leaders and units prepare for and deal with combat once deployed. This project specifically focuses on the individual and team leadership and climate characteristics that best prepare units to perform in the range of missions involved in combat. Initial results show that how units are led prior to and in combat instances can have a significant impact on the performance of those units, soldier well-being, attitudes towards civilians and combatants, and how adaptive the units are once leaving deployment

Baseline Officer Longitudinal Development Study (BOLDS)
BOLDS is an Army Research Institute funded longitudinal project, which is following a cohort of West Point Military Academy cadets that graduated in 1998 to determine how early characteristics and experiences related to leadership predict subsequent development and performance. Specifically, now almost two decades post-graduation, we are trying to determine whether information collected from the cadets during their training at West Point predicts the kinds of professional positions, performance and outlook that they have today towards current leadership challenges being faced in the military or in outside organizations if participants have left the military.

Professional Military Ethics Project
The CLST is working with the US Army’s Center for the Army Profession and Ethic (CAPE) to identify the critical components of what constitutes a soldier’s Professional Military Ethic (PME). This multi-year project involves assessing the current state of the professional military ethic and how it applies to leadership development, as well as what the future state will look like over the next two decades. CLST researchers are currently surveying members of the US Army regarding their perceptions of the current Army’s PME, and will provide support for developing program enhancements that will be administered Army-wide during 2011.

We have recently completed a 20-year longitudinal study of the 1998 Cadet Class of the UW West Point Military Academy. One of the key findings is that how these cadets viewed their leader identity and self-concept when 18 years old, predicted their leader self-awareness 20 years later! Early indicators of leadership potential predicted midcareer perceptions of leadership.

In a recently completed study with over 200 manufacturing units around the globe, we found that the manufacturing facilities led by more authentic leaders, had employees who were more willing to voice their ideas to their supervisors, and in turn each of those factors, predicted key sustainable metrics for these facilities including energy usage and waste.

Employees are oftentimes one of the key stakeholders in firms that have received the least attention from Boards of Directors and their CEOs. Employees are important stakeholders of firms because they are directly engaged in strategy implementation, and thus, are critical to firm success. In a longitudinal research project including 338 publicly traded firms and over 1,000 firm-year observations with data collected between 2010 and 2018, we found that employee approvals ratings of their CEO on Glassdoor.com, predicted the involuntary dismissals of CEOs of those firms.

Gamification is the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts (business processes, behavioral changes, etc.) in order to solve real world problems. Examples of gamification run the gamut – from the simple, such as LinkedIn using a progress bar to show users how complete their profile is, to the more advanced, such as Nike+ using an accelerometer and GPS to track a person’s workout in real-time and awarding them points and badges for different achievements. CLST is researching gamification to improve leadership and strategic thinking by creating Wheels Up.

Wheels Up is an educational, cooper-tition board game for 2-5 players. The purpose of the game is to educate players about two key things:

1. How strategic transformational change unfolds over time within an organization
2. Leadership decision making within customer relations, operational efficiencies, finance, and labor relations.

It was developed using real data collected from a major U.S. airline that had successfully implemented a critical strategic organizational change over a 10 year period. The game involves a hybrid between cooperation and competition strategies (hence the term cooper-tition) because players need to cooperate with each other to address turmoil as it emerges in the game and are also competing with each other to be crowned the MVP.