Scientists from HSE University-St Petersburg Receive Award at International Conference in Morocco
A report by researchers from the Strategic Entrepreneurship Centre received an award at the international conference AIB-MENA (Academy of International Business—Middle-East North Africa) in Morocco. The authors of the work were Galina Shirokova and Aleksandra Zakharova.
The AIB-MENA conference takes place annually and gathers scientists from all over the world. The organiser of the event is the Academy of International Business. The 2023 AIB-MENA conference programme included 23 sessions, panel discussions, and workshops that featured speeches by leading researchers from the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Egypt, the UK and other countries.
The conference also included the presentation of an article by Galina Shirokova and Aleksandra Zakharova and co-written by Virginia Bodolica, professor at the School of Business Administration at the American University of Sharjah. The paper received an award for the best article at the conference in all categories. The team analysed the concept of ‘co-CEOs’ and the terms related to it. The analysis used 74 assignments to the position of co-CEO in 55 companies, 12 countries, and 65 publications in relevant business literature. As a result, the scientists developed a model that helps organisations to choose the most suitable administrative structure depending on the difficulty of administrative tasks and external challenges.
The topic of co-CEOs was chosen deliberately—it is an administrative method seen in large companies all over the world, including Samsung, Netflix and others. 'Such a structure potentially has many strengths: fewer agents and transaction costs, the range of leadership styles is bigger, the level of flexibility is higher, and skills and competencies of the heads complement each other. However, it should be said that each advantage entails some risks: coordination problems, conflicts of opinion, possible contests for power, vulnerability in terms of conflicts, and so on. Not every head can be a good co-head, and not every organisation needs such a structure,' notes Aleksandra Zakharova, researcher at the Strategic Entrepreneurship Centre, who is working on her dissertation about the role of the personal characteristics of top managers in increasing the efficiency of company's activities.
Galina Shirokova, Director of the Strategic Entrepreneurship Centre
In our research, we considered the concept of ‘co-CEOs’ itself and identified the differences from related concepts. For instance, there are many scientific works on 'shared leadership' that may not apply to co-CEOs. So, one should not think that the structure of co-heads refers to shared leadership, even if such a conclusion seems obvious at first glance.
As ‘co-CEO' is an understudied phenomenon, we believe that further research in this direction will be very ambitious. For example, it is interesting to study the personal characteristics of co-CEOs and identify the most suitable combinations of personal characteristics at the individual level: co-leadership is not for everyone. Besides, it would be interesting to study the issues of power dynamics and the correlation between formal and informal power in the structure of co-CEOs. In addition, our current understanding of the role of context and situations when organisations choose the structure of co-CEOs is still quite limited, which is why we would like to continue our work in this sphere.