CBS Leadership Paper Session - January 2026

28th January 202, at 13:00-15:00, room DH 2.V.070 at Copenhagen Business School, Dalgas Have, Frederiksberg

Refreshments: Coffee and pastries

PAPER 1

Confronting Leadership Death: An Existential-Psychoanalytic Perspective on Succession

As recently put in The Economist, “America's bosses just won't quit. That could spell trouble.” Corporations may suffer if this tendency of ‘resistance to succession’ is not addressed, and current scholarship provides few explanations for this growing phenomenon. In this article, we theorized renewed explanations for why top leaders resist succession. Drawing on the existential-psychoanalytic work of Heidegger and Lacan on human finitude, we argue that the impending end of leadership tenure can be a profound existential event dreaded or experienced as a ‘symbolic death,’ which we conceptualize for management studies as ‘leadership death.’ To illustrate our argument and bolster our phenomenon-based theorizing, we engage with the award-winning series Succession as a fictional yet plausible rendition of the real-world phenomenon of resistance to leadership succession. On this basis, we argue that confronting the elusive (im)possibility of leadership death can serve not as a closing of opportunities, but instead as an opening to the prospect of ‘reconfiguring’ the past and recasting the future, ultimately benefiting both the leader and the corporation. We discuss the avenues for studying leadership succession that are thus opened, as well as how our theorizing may recast certainties about what constitutes good leadership, effective governance, and successful professional transitions.     

PAPER 2

Adaptive Leadership: A Critical Interdisciplinary Review and Constructive Redirection for Future Research

By Kevin Lowe, affiliated to the University of Sydney

Most refugees earn lower wages than other employees in host country labor markets, even when compared with other foreign hires with very similar human capital. However, equal work conditions are essential for their integration. We argue that firms with more managers with prior work experience in employer and business associations—Business Associations for short—will pay higher wages to refugees and reduce the disadvantage they face vis-à-vis comparable foreign hires. By connecting businesses, government, and society, business associations are distinct workplaces that equip future managers with unique information about the challenges faced by employers as well as the potential solutions for those challenges. We posit that these managers will have a unique understanding of the strategic value that refugees can have for host country employers. In line with this mechanism, we also argue that those managers will be more effective in alleviating refugee wage inequality especially when the business associations they worked for were located in geographical areas where many refugees lived or worked. Our analysis supports our hypotheses for a sample of 21,021 unique foreign hires (including 6,601 refugees) hired by 1,172 firms in Denmark between 2001 and 2016.

ABOUT THE SERIES

The CBS Leadership Centre wants to bring together researchers across CBS to inspire and nurture cross-disciplinary thinking on leadership. The Leadership Paper Series are a forum for doing exactly this. We invite junior and senior colleagues, as well as visiting and guest scholars, to present and discuss leadership research in progress from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and theoretical traditions. Presenters will receive constructive feedback from discussants and attendees with the aim of developing their papers and arguments for eventual publication.

Papers will be sent out to registered attendees before the event.

Let's stay connected! Interested in speaking at one of our future sessions? Send an email to Dan Kärreman dk.msc@cbs.dk or to Natalie Shefer nas.egb@cbs.dk.