Abstract
What is a good measure for an action-oriented leadership style to employ in the Multi-contingency Model? We develop leadership dimensions of delegation and uncertainty avoidance using factor analysis and test its implications, here on strategic implementation. An explore-exploit view of strategy is similarly confirmed using factor analysis. Using these complementary measures, we test four misfit hypotheses. Of the four, the data from medium-sized Danish enterprises support two hypotheses: a strategy of low exploration is a misfit with a leadership style of high delegation; a strategy of low exploitation is a misfit with a leadership style of high uncertainty avoidance. For researchers, an action-oriented leadership approach is integral to the multi-contingency theory and greatly enriches our theory of organizational design. For CEOs, leadership is made operational and action-oriented to solve problems and resolve misfit conditions for good performance.
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Håkonsson, D.D., Burton, R.M., Obel, B., Lauridsen, J. (2006). Action Leadership, Multi-Contingency Theory and Fit. In: Burton, R.M., Håkonsson, D.D., Eriksen, B., Snow, C.C. (eds) Organization Design. Information and Organization Design Series, vol 6. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34173-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34173-0_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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