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The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted nearly every boardroom in the world. However, neither the extant leadership literature nor the corporate governance literature offers succinct guidance on what constitutes effective board leadership during such a calamity. To address this theoretical and practical need, we develop a moderated mediation model, in which directive leadership from the board chair promotes competitive simplification at the onset of the crisis, which in turn promotes firm financial performance during the crisis. Using survey responses from 120 directors of U.S. public firms in Spring of 2020, combined with firm-level archival data from multiple sources and time periods, we find support for this mediated relationship—but only if the chair is not CEO. If the chair is CEO, we find no evidence of a positive relationship between directive leadership and either competitive simplification or firm financial performance; rather, we find some evidence of a negative relationship. We explore the implications of these findings for the theory and practice of corporate governance and crisis management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional agency theory views the proper role of the board chair exclusively as providing independent oversight to monitor and control the CEO. Recently, firms have introduced innovations in board leadership that have confounded these theoretical expectations. One notable innovation is the executive board chair, a corporate governance hybrid responsible for both oversight and strategic decision-making, challenging agency theory's prescription that the two activities remain separate. In this study, we argue that an executive board chair position can resolve the trade-off between independent oversight and involvement in strategy and therefore generate a performance advantage. We also predict that, owing to the blurring of lines between the CEO and board chair roles that the executive board chair position creates, the relationship will be stronger the greater the need to monitor and control the CEO but weaker when organizational complexity and board leadership demands are greater. Analysis of S&P 1500 firms from 2003 to 2017 provides general support for our arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performance feedback research addresses how firms respond to performance that diverges from their aspirations. Whereas the majority of research in this vein involves financial performance, we apply this framework to product quality performance, arguing that when performance diverges either below or above aspirations, firms will pursue a slower subsequent product introduction rate, either to identify the cause of the underperformance or to incorporate the successful product characteristics in the case of overperformance. We also investigate whether our predictions hold when two boundary conditions are applied. Since product quality aspirations are derived from the "reputations for quality" of the firm and its peers, we argue that the stability of these reputations will amplify the delaying effects of below- and above-aspiration performance. Consistent with research on firm responses to financial performance, we also predict that greater sales revenues relative to sales aspirations will attenuate the delaying effects of aspiration-relative performance divergence. Our analysis of 1,332 video games released by 48 publishers from 2006 to 2009 is largely consistent with these predictions [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management literature offers substantial insight about many aspects of CEO-related phenomena. Whether it involves aspects of the position of CEO, personal characteristics of the CEO, or the environment in which the CEO operates, research about the CEO has yielded a number of important findings. Despite the proliferation of research regarding the CEO, we find that the literature as a whole is fragmented. By this, we mean that the CEO is often used as a context to test discrete theories. In this article, we contend that the fragmentation in the literature is a result of scholarship existing within theoretical fault lines and rarely venturing to incorporate theories beyond a given domain. This fragmentation results in inconsistent and inconclusive findings in the CEO-related literature. We propose an integrative framework, which we call the configurational perspective on the CEO, to help resolve this fragmentation problem. The configurational perspective on the CEO highlights three separate CEO-related research domains: the position, the person, and the environment. In taking stock of research in each of these domains, we address how they can be integrated in different configurations to help reduce the fragmented nature of the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CEO duality—the practice of a single individual serving as both CEO and board chair—has been the subject of academic interest for more than 20 years. In that time, boards’ use of CEO duality has fluctuated and the scholarly conceptualizations of the phenomenon have become more complex. As such, the need to understand CEO duality has only increased with time. We review and integrate the disparate literature on this topic so that future attempts to study it will benefit from a more complete understanding of the knowledge already produced. We review the demonstrated antecedents and consequences of CEO duality, pointing out that while much work has been done in this area, much remains that we do not understand. Finally, we offer new theoretical, methodological, and contextual directions that researchers could explore to extend knowledge about CEO duality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]