Perspectives in strategic leadership: Charting the past and forging new frontiers

Abstract

This research endeavors to holistically chart the field of strategic leadership using a novel methodology, recognizing the fragmentation of the field, as well as conducting research on its new frontiers. Recognizing the paramount significance of strategic leadership in the organizational landscape. It commences by highlighting the fragmented nature of the literature on strategic leadership, acknowledging the lack of a holistic understanding in scholarly discourse. The first study proposes a pioneering mixed-method review, merging quantitative and qualitative approaches to remedy this. This comprehensive examination employs a coding framework grounded in a contemporary definition of strategic leadership, alongside bibliometric and thematic clustering methodologies. Through this, the review strives to identify integration opportunities, trace the evolution, and discern emerging trends in the field. Importantly, it advocates a comprehensive methodology, recognizing the inadequacies of solely quantitative or qualitative analyses. The second study underscores the vital role of ethical traits among CEOs, particularly honesty-humility, in light of recent corporate ethical lapses. It introduces PATH (Personality Assessment Tool for HEXACO) as a solution to challenges arising from CEO inaccessibility and self-reporting bias. PATH leverages videometric analysis and machine learning techniques, focusing on honesty-humility, to predict HEXACO scores using transcribed text. While demonstrating reliability and convergent and divergent validity, it acknowledges its performance gap compared to established tools, possibly attributed to differences in sample sizes. The study advocates expanding PATH's training dataset to enhance its predictive accuracy. This research contributes to organizational behavior, strategy, and strategic leadership literature. Extending beyond the Big Five framework and incorporating the HEXACO model offers valuable insights into CEO personality within an ethical context, including potential markers of dishonesty. PATH's emergence addresses methodological limitations, enabling the exploration of CEO personality on a broader scale and facilitating an understanding of its implications for firm-level outcomes. This dual focus on strategic leadership and CEO personality enriches the discourse, emphasizing the need for ongoing PATH development through additional training and validation data