Towards the Theory of CEO Leadership: A Conceptual Model based on Charismatic, Transformational and Transactional Leadership

Leadership is one of the most widely explored subjects in the field of management. A variety of papers on leadership, however, still have insufficient aspects to reveal the theoretical logic about the CEO leadership itself. Such research, especially focused on organizational performance, tend to concentrate on the CEO’s behavior rather than leadership because CEO’s behavioral trait as an explanatory variable is useful to connect with firms’ performance. Our purpose is to show how the characteristic of CEO leadership can be built at the organizational level. For a detail, the larger the firms’ size, the greater the degree of CEO’s charismatic leadership. The larger the degree of a firm’s diversification, the greater the degree of the CEO’s transformational leadership. And the less the degree of a firm’s diversification, the greater the degree of the CEO’s transactional leadership. This theoretical paper on CEO leadership suggests that the characteristics of CEO should be adaptable to the changing institutions and organizational environments.