In hierarchical organizations the role of a team leader often requires making decisions which do not necessarily coincide with the majority opinion of the team. However, these decisions are final and binding for all team members. We study experimentally why, and under which conditions, leaders...

We explore why authority within firms helps trading parties immediately settle ex post adaptation problems despite the possibility of a subordinate's disobedience to the orders of his boss. By employing three crucial behavioral assumptions (reference-dependent preference, self-serving bias, and...

Drawing on identity and social comparison theories, we propose and test a model of motivation to lead based on two types of self-to-role comparisons (i.e., self-comparisons with specific leaders and with more abstract representations of the leadership role). We propose that these comparisons...

Individual leaders have been central to the transformation of organizations, political institutions and many instances of social and economic reform. In this paper we take a first step towards analyzing the role of leadership to ask: when and how does a leader engineer change? We show that while...