When Leaders Step Back: Productive Restraint, Strategic Absence, and Peer Collaboration

Keisuke Hattori

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: Highly productive leaders can directly raise team output, but excessive involvement may hinder collaboration among team members. We study two leadership styles. Under Leading by Contribution, in which the leader commits to her own effort before members act, preserving peer collaboration may require productive restraint: she deliberately limits her own productive effort. Under Leading by Backup, in which the leader can step in after members act, preserving peer collaboration may require strategic absence: she commits to being unavailable as a backup with positive probability. Sufficiently able leaders prefer greater productive involvement without peer collaboration. Therefore, a small increase in ability can trigger greater productive involvement and a discrete drop in team output. The model also shows why performance-based appointment may select a more productive leader who nevertheless generates lower team output.

Keywords: Leadership; Peer collaboration; Team production; Productive restraint; Strategic absence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 L23 M12 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/344080/1/StepBackingLeaders_WP.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:esprep:344080

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().