ABSTRACT
The idea of co-leadership – that two people might successfully share an organizational leadership role on an equal footing – has been received skeptically by management scholars from Henri Fayol (1949) to Edwin Locke (2003), and also by the popular press, as evidenced in recent blog titles such as “With co-CEOs, companies irt with disaster” (Zillman, 2014) and “The co-CEO model is ocially dead” (Frisch, 2012). Skeptics cite the potential for confusion, con-ict, ambiguity and lack of accountability as reasons why such an arrangement is likely to fail. Yet, co-leadership is nevertheless alive and well. It is quite frequent in certain sectors (e.g., the arts, health care) and there have been several co-CEO pairs at the summit of high-prole business rms (e.g., Google, Goldman-Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Whole Foods) who have managed to sustain collaboration over many years even though, at some point, these arrangements may eventually dissolve, or break down (but single CEOs leave too).
