Leadership, Beliefs and Coordination: An Explorative Discussion

By N. J. Foss. 2001

115 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although recent economics contributions represent important strides forward in the understanding of leadership behavior, the cognitive and symbolic dimensions of the phenomenon have attracted virtually no interest from economists and game theorists. I argue that an understanding of these dimensions may be founded on coordination games, particularly to the extent that these illustrate interactive belief formation. In this context leadership is defined as the taking of actions that coordinate the complementary actions of many people through the creation of belief conditions that substitute for common knowledge and where these actions characteristically consists of some act of communication directed at those being led. The concept of common knowledge (or its approximation by means of notions of common belief) is argued to be particularly important to understanding leadership. Thus, leaders may establish common knowledge conditions, and assist the coordination of strategies in this way, or make decisions in situations where coordination problems persist in spite of common knowledge. Copyright 2001 by Oxford University Press.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1cc100abd094b83d7d6df44a684c5078ec9d44fe

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Citations in the corpus

Is Knowledge Power? Knowledge Flows, Subsidiary Power and Rent-Seeking within MNCs (2004, methodology): “In implementing the C-M form to solve coordination problems, headquarters needs to exercise ‘leadership’ in the sense of Foss (2001) to”
Leading by example with and without exclusion power in voluntary contribution experiments (2007, background): “Arce (2001) and Foss (2001) identify leadership in their models as a means to achieve efficient outcomes in social dilemma games.”
Firms as Realizations of Entrepreneurial Visions (2007, background): “From the firm members’ observation of, and communication about, the performance and motivation of other firm members, a common, group-specific, rule or model of behaviour is likely to emerge (Bandura, 1986, Ch. 2; see also Aldrich, 1999, Ch. 6; Foss, 2001; Robertson and Swan, 2003).”