Strategic leadership and technological innovation: A comprehensive review and research agenda

• Author: Andreas König,Christopher Kurzhals,Lorenz Graf‐Vlachy
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12351
• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Date: 01 November 2020

REVIEW ARTICLE

Strategic leadership and technological innovation: A

comprehensive review and research agenda

Christopher Kurzhals

1

| Lorenz Graf-Vlachy

2

| Andreas König

1

1

University of Passau, Passau, Germany

2

ESCP Business School, Paris, France

Correspondence

Christopher Kurzhals, University of Passau,

Innstraße 27, 94032 Passau, Germany.

Email: kurzha01@ads.uni-passau.de

Abstract

Research Question/Issue: We review the literature on the relationship between stra-

tegic leadership and technological innovation.

Research Findings/Insights: We identify the theoretical lenses that researchers apply

when studying strategic leadership and innovation, most notably agency theory and

upper echelons theory. We review the innovation constructs and measures that

scholars employ, and we survey the links among strategic leaders' characteristics and

technological innovation. Ultimately, we organize the literature into an integrative

framework that provides a concise overview of the extant knowledge, and we outline

an agenda for future research.

Theoretical/Academic Implications: First, we offer scholars a discipline-spanning

overview of the extant knowledge on the topic. Second, by integrating important

aspects of corporate governance, such as the role of the board of directors,

incentives for the chief executive officer or the top management team, and firm own-

ership, into the context of technological innovation, we highlight the vital role it plays

in the realm of technological innovation. Third, we provide a useful guide for scholars

and direct their work towards fruitful avenues for future research.

Practitioner/Policy Implications: We offer insights for practitioners interested in bet-

ter understanding the bidirectional relationship between strategic leadership and

technological innovation. In particular, our framework and our detailed analysis of

the impact of strategic leaders on technological innovation can guide shareholders

and board members in matters related to board composition as well as top executive

selection and compensation.

KEYWORDS

Corporate governance, innovation, strategic leadership, technology

1|INTRODUCTION

Scholars have long sought to understand technological innovation

(Ahuja, Lampert, & Tandon, 2008; Dosi, 1982; Schumpeter, 1942;

Teece, 1996), which can be broadly defined as changes in the

ways value is created and captured in a given field

(Damanpour, 1987; Hill & Rothaermel, 2003). Such changes include

both discontinuous technological breakthroughs and incremental

progress (Anderson & Tushman, 1990; Dewar & Dutton, 1986).

Technological innovation is vital for the survival of companies

because, without it, firms are unlikely to generate a sustainable

competitive advantage (Hill & Rothaermel, 2003; Tripsas &

Gavetti, 2000). The ability to adopt technologies is particularly

important considering today's rapid technical advances, which in

Received: 31 August 2019 Revised: 8 October 2020 Accepted: 8 October 2020

DOI: 10.1111/corg.12351

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reprodu ction in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2020 The Authors. Corporate Governance: An International Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Corp Govern Int Rev. 2020;28:437–464. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/corg 437

turn trigger grand challenges and opportunities (Tidd &

Bessant, 2018).

Not surprisingly, given the key role of technological innovation,

researchers have increasingly focused on the impact of strategic

leaders—those executives who, as members of the board of directors

or the top management team (TMT), are particularly influential

(Finkelstein, Hambrick, & Cannella, 2009). Upper echelons theory sug-

gests that strategic leaders affect organizational outcomes in general

and innovation in particular (Hambrick & Mason, 1984), especially

because they influence organizational attention, resource commit-

ment, strategic choices, and implementation strategies (Carpenter,

Geletkanycz, & Sanders, 2004; Gerstner, König, Enders, &

Hambrick, 2013; Kaplan, 2008a). In this vein, researchers in various

disciplines, including corporate governance (e.g., Rose, Rose, Nor-

man, & Mazza, 2014), strategic management (e.g., Kor, 2006), finance

(e.g., Ammann, Horsch, & Oesch, 2016), and entrepreneurship

(e.g., Gedajlovic, Cao, & Zhang, 2012), have studied the relationship

between strategic leaders and innovation, creating a need to consoli-

date the current state of knowledge.

Scholars have conducted valuable reviews in the field of innova-

tion, including reviews of literature on the role of leadership. How-

ever, the limited reach of these reviews has ramifications for the

analytic, predictive, and normative potential of research in this

domain. Three limitations are particularly noteworthy. First, several

broad reviews of the innovation literature identify managerial charac-

teristics as one of several antecedents of technological innovation

(Ahuja, Lampert, & Tandon, 2008) or technological discontinuities

(Eggers & Park, 2018), but they hardly discuss the paths of influence.

Second, some reviews offer outdated and incomplete overviews of

the relevant characteristics of strategic leaders. For example, Crossan

and Apaydin (2010) investigated the impact of the board and the TMT

on innovation. However, that review is a decade old and only captures

a small subset of the relevant characteristics of strategic leaders.

Third, some reviews only link certain strategic leaders with

specific innovation outcomes. For example, Back and Bausch (2019)

examined the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) leadership on

various firm-level antecedents of product innovation, such as social

capital. Yet they do not consider a substantial number of studies that

directly link CEO characteristics to technological innovation more

broadly, and they do not consider strategic leaders other than the

CEO. As such, no comprehensive review on strategic leadership

and technological innovation is available, making it difficult for

scholars to build on previous findings and identify relevant research

questions.

Our review fills this gap. We aim to answer four interrelated

questions: (1) What are the main theoretical lenses that scholars

have applied when exploring the relationship between strategic

leadership and technological innovation? (2) Which constructs and

measures of technological innovation have scholars combined with

certain facets of strategic leadership? (3) How are the characteris-

tics of strategic leaders empirically related to different aspects of

innovation? and (4) What are potentially fruitful avenues for future

research?

2|METHOD

To ensure a comprehensive account of the literature, we conducted a

systematic review (e.g., David & Han, 2004; Rousseau, Manning, &

Denyer, 2008). Given the multidisciplinary nature of the domain, we

first identified 35 relevant peer-reviewed journals from different

fields. These included the 30 outlets used in Wowak et al.'s (2017)

recent review of incentives in strategic leadership. To specifically cap-

ture corporate-governance aspects, we also included a leading journal

focused on that topic. In addition, owing to the focus of this review,

we included two journals concerned with innovation, which two inno-

vation scholars confirmed were the most important in the field.

Finally, we included two major journals dealing with family firms, as

family firms are one of the most prevalent firm types (La Porta,

Lopez-De-Silanes, & Shleifer, 1999; Lodh, Nandy, & Chen, 2014).

Moreover, family ownership and family involvement in strategic deci-

sion making substantially affect firms' technological innovation

(De Massis, Frattini, & Lichtenthaler, 2013; Lodh, Nandy, &

Chen, 2014). In fact, as De Massis et al. (2013, p. 10) noted, “there are

strong theoretical reasons to believe that the antecedents and effects

of technological innovation are different in family and nonfamily firms.”

Again, we validated our selection with two family business scholars.

Table 1 provides an overview of the journals included in our review.

Using the above-mentioned definitions of strategic leadership

and technological innovation as our conceptual anchors, we created a

list of keywords. To validate our selection of keywords, we discussed

them with management and innovation scholars and consulted

scholars from economics and finance. These discussions led to the

addition of a few keywords to our initial list. Table 2 shows the final

list of keywords used in our literature search.

We set the review's starting point to 1984 to cover all literature

published after Hambrick and Mason's (1984) seminal paper, which

highlighted the importance of strategic leaders for organizational out-

comes and laid the foundations for upper echelons theory. We then

identified an initial sample of 937 articles published before the end of

2019 using the Web of Science database.

We read all articles' abstracts and, if necessary, their main texts

and retained those articles that fulfilled two criteria. First, each article

had to examine strategic leaders (i.e., boards of directors, CEOs, other

TMT members, and/or business unit heads) (Finkelstein, Hambrick, &

Cannella, 2009). Second, each article had to focus on technological

innovation (Damanpour, 1987). We removed articles in which the

hypotheses or propositions were not related to both criteria. More-

over, we removed articles dealing with young firms and start-ups

owing to the specific context in which these firms and their strategic

leaders operate (e.g., Park & Tzabbar, 2016).

Overall, we retained 158 articles and systematically coded each

article for central theoretical and methodological aspects. For exam-

ple, we examined the theoretical lens(es) that each study applied as

well as the methodological approaches and the results. Table A1 in

Data S1 summarizes the studies we reviewed.

In line with the growing importance of technological innovation

for organizations (Tidd & Bessant, 2018), the number of studies on

438 KURZHALS ET AL.