Developing Strategic Leadership Capabilities: Empirical Results

Strategic leadership is one of the main research directions in mainstream strategic management. It has been hotly debated among certain groups of theoreticians and practitioners of management for many years; however, it should be emphasized that the various views on this subject were and still are quite diverse. The reason for such divergent opinions is probably the fact that the essence of leadership is still one of the least recognized issues in strategic management. The research gap can be identified as a deficit of current empirical research on strategic leadership capabilities. The aim of the article is to define strategic leadership through its characteristic abilities, and to determine the practices which enhance the development of these abilities. This will be accomplished both in theory and empirically in the presentation of the research results. After an analysis and review of the literature, the first part of the work presents a definition of strategic leadership and the context in which it is used. The basis for the empirical conclusions is the quantitative research carried out in May and June 2017 on a sample of 424 medium and large companies in Poland. The research findings indicate the relatively high potential of Polish enterprises with regard to the development of strategic leadership capabilities. The analysis revealed that the assessments for almost all the analysed dimensions were higher than average, which shows the great interest of enterprises in the indicated practices that support the development of strategic leadership capabilities. This was also confirmed by an analysis of the distribution of the responses.