Executive Job Demands: New Insights for Explaining Strategic Decisions and Leader Behaviors

Executive jobs vary widely in the difficulty they pose for their incumbents, yet research on top executives and strategic decision making has largely ignored this reality. We build on work in industrial/organizational psychology to develop the construct of executive job demands; discuss its major determinants; propose some of its key implications for strategic choices and leadership behaviors; and propose the usefulness of this construct in advancing research on numerous fronts, including agency theory, executive compensation, and upper echelons.