Linking Leadership Studies to Corporate Brand Management: A Review

Abstract

Two models of corporate brand or reputation management include “leadership and success” as a dimension that influences reactions of multiple stakeholders to organisations. Primary groups of stakeholders such as shareholders/investors, employees, and customers, often associate leadership of organisations with Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) or managing directors. This paper proposes that if CEOs are to be capitalised as part of corporate brand management, their leadership should be projected clearly to stakeholders to influence stakeholder attitudes. Although some studies tend to focus on linking leadership brands and transformational leadership to employees’ commitment, little is known what type(s) of leadership is (are) attractive to multiple stakeholders. Both, leadership brands and transformational leadership, can be presented as leadership archetypes, that is, personifications of abstract leadership qualities summing up leaders’ traits and behaviours in situational contexts. Using the Competing Values Framework (CVF) for leadership, the researchers reviewed publications of CEO leadership in situational contexts and classified the CEO leadership roles based on the respective scholars’ conceptual definitions. The classification revealed that CEOs were perceived as playing multiple leadership roles, which are manifested into leadership archetypes. The archetypes were derived from respondents’ perceptions and had different labels subject to the situational contexts. Some of the archetypes reflect CEO functional roles, whilst others were metaphoric. A few leadership archetypes were common across academic literature, whilst others were not. These archetypes offer explicit representations of “leadership” dimension of the CBM models and can assist image generators to gauge which leadership archetypes are excellent or appealing to multiple stakeholders.