18379 EXAMINING THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONS IN STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP STRUCTURES USING CONFIGURATIONAL ANALYSIS RENE OLIE Rotterdam School of Management Erasmus University Rotterdam The Netherlands REKHA RAO-NICHOLSON Newcastle University London ABSTRACT This work explores the national differences in strategic leadership across countries with CEO centrality and TMT interdependence as two dimensions. Using configurations of informal and formal institutions as paths to strategic leadership, the combinations of institutions shaping cross- national variations are examined. Results show that national institutions’ influence strategic leadership structures. Keywords: Strategic Leadership, formal and informal national institutions, CEO centrality, TMT interdependence, fsQCA. INTRODUCTION How much and under which conditions do top executives matter in shaping strategic behavior and firm outcomes? This has been a central question in most Strategic Leadership (SL) research. Based on the assumption that the CEO is the most powerful person in the organizational hierarchy, much SL research has focused on the CEO in shaping organizational behavior and outcomes (c.f. Finkelstein, Hambrick & Cannella, 2009). However, with the growing realization that leadership in large, complex organizations is an activity that involves groups of executives rather individual leaders, researchers have also focused on entire Top Management Teams (TMTs) and their effects on firm behavior and outcomes (cf. Finkelstein & Hambrick, 1996; Carpenter, Geletkanycz, & Sanders, 2004). The basic premise of this ‘Upper Echelon perspective’ (Hambrick & Mason, 1984) is that a focus on TMT characteristics will yield stronger explanations of organizational behavior and outcomes than focusing on the characteristics of individual CEOs (Hambrick, 2007). Surprisingly, this debate has paid limited attention to the role of national institutional systems in shaping the roles, structures, and responsibilities of CEOs and executive teams. Despite evidence that leadership profiles, leadership styles, roles, and responsibilities vary across countries due to differences in value orientations (Hofstede, 2001) and differences in national governance systems (Aguilera and Jackson, 2010; Olie et al., 2012), research on the cross-national diversity in strategic leadership has been limited. Two studies are worth mentioning. In a three-country study, Crossland and Hambrick (2007) found that CEOs of US-based firms had a significantly higher effect on company performance than CEOs from Germany and Japan. In a follow-up study including 15 different countries, Crossland and Hambrick (2011) examined how nation-level institutions affect the CEO effect. For this purpose, they examined how formal (e.g., ownership dispersion, legal origin, and employer flexibility) and informal institutions (e.g., power distance,