Strategic Leadership: Moving Beyond the Leader-Follower Dyad

Contemporary organizations operate in an increasingly complex environment and organize themselves more and more horizontally, across organizational boundaries. Yet the leadership literature remains focused on the internal organization, largely neglecting the organizational context. There is a need for a leadership answer that suits the current context; a need for the conceptualization, operationalization and application of strategic leadership. This dissertation develops a multidimensional measure for strategic leadership behavior. Strategic leadership is set apart from supervisory, face-to-face leadership behavior and is conceptualized as dealing with two organizational paradoxes (i.e. External Environment versus Internal Organization and Exploitation versus Exploration), resulting in a model of four dimensions: 1)organizational creativity, 2) business development, 3) client centricity and 4) operational efficiency. The methodology consists of an elaborate and sophisticated statistical analysis, consisting of exploratory, confirmatory and discriminant analyses in order to establish the new 20-item, four-dimensional measure. Moreover the model was tested in terms of effectiveness on subordinate’ job satisfaction and on team performance. The strategic leadership concept is shown to be distinct from the mainstream supervisory leadership concept proven by the empirical statistical data. Moreover, this dissertation provides evidence for the differential manifestation and impact of supervisory and strategic leadership behavior across organizational levels. It equally demonstrates that the strategic leadership model holds promising value when considering the team as a source of leadership, having a positive impact on environment-oriented team effectiveness. The latter finding is especially interesting in the light of the societal trend, where organizations need to tailor their leadership endeavours much more to what happens outside of the organization.

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