The human factor in top management

Professor Donald C. Hambrick during his keynote speech at the University of Passau, showing how strategic leadership research has developed since he founded his theory.

Professor Hambrick was one of around 100 top international researchers who came to the University of Passau from June 5 to 6 for the thirteenth "EIASM Workshop on Top Management Teams and Business Strategy Research" to discuss the future of the discipline. The conference was organized by Passau management researcher Professor Andreas König and his chair, together with Professor Basak Yakis Douglas (King's College, London) and Professor Lorenz Graf-Vlachy (TU Dortmund University), as well as the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM), a scientific network headquartered in Brussels. The topic: "Strategic Leadership and Attention in a Post-Chandlerian World". The term "Post-Chandlerian" refers to the thesis of the US economic historian Alfred D. Chandler from the 1970s, according to which companies should adapt their organizational structure to their strategy. Back then, organizations had a clear hierarchical structure and strategy was decided top-down, explained Professor Basak Yakis-Douglas. "Today, organizations are much more networked, there are many more stakeholders inside and outside the organization and this naturally has an impact on strategy."

It is no coincidence that the researchers came to Passau to discuss the direction of the research field in a radically changing time: the topic organically aligns with the research of the DFG Research Training Group 2720 "Digital Platform Ecosystems" at the University of Passau. After all, digital platforms and their ecosystems are by definition part of post-chandlerian organizations.

Founder of two lines of research at the University of Passau

The workshop brought the founders of two strands of research as keynote speakers to Passau:

Donald Hambrick, Evan Pugh Professor and Smeal Chaired Professor for Management at the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University, developed the so-called Upper Echelons Theory 40 years ago and thus fundamentally shaped management and organization research (see: Hambrick & Mason (1984). The groundbreaking thesis of upper echelons theory is that an organization is ultimately also a reflection of the values, norms and personalities of the members of top management. "I think this theory explains far more phenomena today than it did back then," said Professor Hambrick, who also holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Passau. Top managers are confronted with a much more complex environment, with a wealth of ambiguous influences. "This means that top managers’ biases are more prevalent than when my co-author Philis Mason and I developed the theory."

Professor Willie Ocasio showing examples of Chandlerian and Post-Chandlerian organisations.

Willie Ocasio, PhD, James F. Towey Professor of Business and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, founded the so-called Attention-Based View of the Firm more than 25 years ago (see: Ocasio, 1997). According to this view, the behavior of companies can be explained by how they channel and distribute the attention of their decision-makers and organization members. "Today's world needs a completely different form of leadership that is less about command and control," says Professor Ocasio. "It's more about communication, inspiration, creating a sense of purpose, creating a strong culture in organizations." Artificial intelligence technologies could also be used here, for example to help structure the flood of information.

In addition to these two keynote speakers, the following researchers contributed to the workshop as panelists: Elizabeth J. Altman, Associate Professor of Management at the Manning School of Business, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA, and Pinar Ozcan, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, UK, are among the most important scholars in the field of digital platforms and ecosystems. Tomi Laamanen, Professor of Strategic Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, is considered one of the most influential representatives of the a attention-based view of the firm. Theresa Cho is Professor of Strategic Management and International Business at Seoul National University, South Korea. Her research at the beginning of the millennium was the very first to explicitly integrate upper echelons theory and the attention-oriented view of the company.

New research approaches for a new era

The workshop brought more than one hundred researchers from all over the world to Passau, including many other top researchers such as Mike Tushman, Ph. D., Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School, as well as selected young researchers from Europe, the US, and Asia. Tine Buyl, Professor of Organization Studies at Tilburg University and a member of the EIASM workshop's permanent scientific committee, emphasized the workshop's particularly constructive focus: "What makes our workshop special is that it is really about brainstorming research topics in the early stages".