Boardroom leadership: The board of directors as a source of strategic leadership

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to bring together some of the foundational and recent literature interlinking corporate governance and the leadership role of the board of directors. Strategic leadership is widely assumed to be a responsibility that defaults to the Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). However, in practice, what most CEOs do is strategic management rather than strategic leadership. While strategic management does share key aspects of strategic leadership CEOs are expected to prioritize the managerial side over the leadership side. This is just one of the situations in which the boardroom assumes the leadership role. This paper discusses how boards of directors conduct the process of strategic leadership in their organizations. In recent years there has been an increasing interest among scholars to understand how boards strategize from a behavioral point of view. This growing interest has resulted in the development of various typologies regarding boards’ involvement in the strategic leadership processes.