Published on: July 18, 2025 at 5:49 pm
When the president or CEO is getting up there in age or is planning a move, that outgoing leader’s support in the transition is crucial.
Academy of Management Scholar Donald Hambrick of Pennsylvania State University, who published an article in Academy of Management Review on this topic, said that top leaders’ mindset is “a relatively stable motivational orientation that stems from the CEO’s disposition and accumulated life experiences”, laying the foundation for the succession and the preparation of the selected successor. He and coauthors Aparna Joshi and Jiyeon Kang, both Penn State colleagues, identified four types of such CEO mindsets:
- generative
- hyper-generative
- hypo-generative
- anti-generative
“Of the four types, we hold up in the most positive light what we call the generative CEO,” Hambrick said. “This is somebody who understands that he or she is eventually going to have to move on and has no issue with that and is getting ready for that and who also is not insistent on driving the succession-planning process.
“He or she leaves that up to the board out of recognition that the board needs to have the leeway to pick somebody they’re comfortable with—possibly at the 11th hour—who is needed to respond and adapt to emerging conditions,” he said.
“It is not necessarily somebody who’s in the same mold as the incumbent themselves.”
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A sample of Hambrick’s AOM research findings:
- Four CEO Mindsets Can Affect Their Replacements’ Transitions
- How CEOs Become A-List Stars
- Celebrity CEOs Often Get Typecast into One of Four Roles
- Are You Sure You Have a Strategy?
