A happy new year to everyone -- and a friendly reminder: The deadline for two-page proposals is just one month away!
Increasing Our Impact: Strategic Leadership Theory for a De-Stabilizing World
10th EIASM Workshop on Top Management Team and Business Strategy Research
Passau, Germany, June 6-7, 2019
Deadline for paper proposals: January 31, 2019
Keynote speakers and panelists:
Donald C. Hambrick (Penn State University)
Timothy Quigley (University of Georgia)
Albrecht Enders (IMD International)
Bolko von Oetinger (WHU Graduate School of Management & BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt)
For scholars studying strategic leadership, 2019 will be marked by two important anniversaries. First, 35 years ago, in 1984, Hambrick and Mason published their seminal paper on Upper Echelons Theory which many consider as the genesis of strategic leadership research. Second, 2019 marks the 10th anniversary of the EIASM Workshop on Top Management Teams and Business Strategy Research. In this spirit, we will seize the occasion of the 2019 workshop to look back to understand the key premises and assumptions of strategic leadership studies and, more importantly, to look forward to cast a vision for such research in the coming years.
Especially, the 2019 workshop will focus on the topic of "Increasing our impact: Strategic leadership theory for a de-stabilizing world." In this regard, it is worth noting that upper echelons theory emerged in the specific historical and social context of the turn from the 1970s to the 1980s, a context in which actors within and outside organizations began to attribute considerable significance to top managers regarding important managerial outcomes (Quigley & Hambrick, 2015; Quigley, Crossland, & Campbell, 2016). While strategic leadership theory has, for the most part, stayed true to its roots in the Carnegie school and the behavioral theory of the firm (Cyert & March, 1963), strategic leadership scholars have constantly attempted to account for many critical contextual changes and circumstantial differences that might affect the underlying assumptions and boundary conditions of upper echelons theory (Buyl, Boone, & Wade, 2017; Crossland & Chen, 2013; Gerstner, König, Enders, & Hambrick, 2013; Finkelstein & Hambrick, 1990; Hambrick, 2007; König, Graf-Vlachy, Bundy, & Little, 2018). In precisely this vein, the participants of the last EIASM Workshop on Top Management Teams and Business Strategy Research in Geneva addressed the question of how upper echelons research should account for the substantial shifts in organizing and leadership that might be triggered by digitalization.
However, despite our adaptations and advances of strategic leadership research – and especially in light of the two anniversaries we celebrate – an even more general question emerges, namely that of our overall impact. What have we achieved? Where are we going? To which degree is what we can explain valuable for the greater causes to which we as social scientists strive to contribute? Formulated as a critical question: How might the assumptions and views we maintain and disseminate limit our scholarly endeavors, and how might we have to scrutinize and reform our ontological, epistemological, theoretical, and methodological perspectives and approaches to increase our practical contribution while staying true to our scholarly identity?
These questions appear even more important in the context of our time, which many perceive as a period of destabilization that shakes up taken-for-granted institutions around leadership (O'Reilly, Doerr, & Chatman, 2018; Williams, Pillai, McCombs, Deptula, & Lowe, 2018). In fact, if we aim to envision the next decade of strategic leadership, we might have to consider that it is not only technological breakthroughs that challenge our views of top executives' characteristics, actions, and their outcomes. Over the past years, we have increasingly been experiencing violations of norms and accepted leadership approaches, propagating ego-driven and transactional leadership styles. So, the question is how does our theorizing account for the ongoing institutional changes around strategic leadership? Do we need to re-organize our understanding of norms, organizational and political processes, and enactments of personality to describe, interpret, and generalize patterns of strategic leadership in the next decades, and if so, how? What is our responsibility in this context, and how can we make sure our findings are heard and help strategic leaders to make better and long-term-oriented decisions in light of grand environmental, political, and societal challenges (Colquitt & George, 2011)?
We invite researchers to submit papers that address any of the topics suggested above. Moreover, in the open-minded tradition of our workshop, we call for research on any questions related to TMTs and individual top executives.
Chairpersons:
Andreas König and Lorenz Graf-Vlachy
(University of Passau)
Scientific Committee:
Tine Buyl (Tilburg University)
Alejandro Escribá (University of Valencia)
Lorenz Graf-Vlachy (University of Passau)
Andreas König (University of Passau)
Marko Reimer (WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management)
-- Dr. Lorenz Graf-Vlachy Lehrstuhl für Strategisches Management, Innovation und Entrepreneurship Universität Passau Dr.-Hans-Kapfinger-Str. 14b 94032 Passau +49-851-509-2515 lorenz.graf-vlachy@uni-passau.de http://www.wiwi.uni-passau.de/strategie-innovation/