Research

A principal activity of COLE is encouraging and supporting the exploration of leadership issues and ethical behavior. The following principles provide guidance in prioritizing the research projects that COLE undertakes and the methods applied to those initiatives.

• Generate, collect and synthesize theoretically grounded and analytically rigorous research on the individual, small group, and organization-level factors affecting leadership and ethics.
  
• Generate and collect tools which executives can use to improve the practice of leadership and ethical behavior in organizations.
  

Under these two guiding principles, our current research explores several themes:

• The type of leadership needed to address today's challenges, including leading across differences (generational, gender, cultural, functional, geographic/virtual)
• Linking behaviors to specific (performance outcomes, including innovation and sustainable organizational performance
• Understanding the effectiveness of specific interventions in the development of leaders in the undergraduate, graduate, and executive populations
• Interdisciplinary approaches to leadership that examines the commonalities and differences among fields such as business, engineering, political science, law, medicine, media/entertainment, athletics
• The role of leaders in helping people make sense of complex and changing organizational systems which bridges between micro and macro organizational topics
• The interplay between leadership and ethics