The Work Foundation’s research programme, ‘Leading for High Performance’ is a three-year, comprehensive study which will focus on the specific role played by leaders in creating the conditions for high performance.

The study will look at how leaders’ behaviour affects team and organisational performance, and, once identified, these approaches and techniques will be tested to establish how applicable they are to other organisations. The study marks a move away from the abstract assumptions about what makes effective leaders, and instead aims to develop an empirically based theory of leadership, looking at all levels of leadership, not just CEO and senior management and to test its impact on performance.

Penny Tamkin has been appointed to lead the project, joining The Work Foundation after 13 years at the Institute for Employment Studies where she held the position of associate director.  She said: ‘The enormous outpouring of material on leadership during the last few years has been characterised by a surfeit of hope, hunch, superstition and guesswork. Our project will be different. We plan to ground our research in the evidence and in close observation of how real leaders work in real organisations. At the end we hope to have a very clear picture of how leaders spur the performance of their companies.’

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