Promoting Leadership in Governance and Governance in Leadership: Towards a Supportive Research Agenda

Summary The fields of leadership and corporate governance have, in their own rights, become the domains of significant interest recently for academics and business practitioners alike. While they often focus on similar phenomena, they rarely interact or engage with each other. In this chapter we argue that there is much to be gained by integrating and cross-fertilizing research efforts within the corporate governance and leadership research fields. Their strengths and weaknesses mutually complement each other: leadership has been traditionally strong in highlighting significant interpersonal dynamic processes within organizations but has been biased by its attention to the middle and lower ranks of the organization. Corporate governance, on the other hand, has developed an upper echelons perspective but have been hamstrung by a preoccupation with formal, static and impersonal theoretical models. We therefore suggest that there is much to be gained by creating a theoretical rapprochement between the two fields which will have positive repercussions not only in terms of fresh empirical insights but also in terms of improving and energizing the everyday practice of corporate governance. By way of example, we highlight three important intersections at which governance and leadership processes can come together in any organization: team leadership on the board, the chair’s leadership of the board and strategic leadership by the board. We conclude by raising a number of research questions that can be profitably researched by taking both a ‘leadership in governance’ and a ‘governance in leadership’ perspective.