ABSTRACT
In prior chapters we have focused on whether executives have an impact on organizational performance, and we have proposed a model for the effects of executive leadership on performance. In this chapter we will address several issues pertaining to the cognitive, emotional, and structural factors that underlie executive actions. Here we directly address the question of how executives process information in making key organizational decisions, and we relate our coverage of this issue to understanding change processes at both the organizational and the individual levels. In doing so, we integrate many of the ideas that have been developed in previous chapters and show how this approach helps organize some of the existing research on leadership and organizational decline.
