Asymmetric Spillover of Leadership Contagion - EMAC, Glasgow 2018; AMA, Boston 2018

Existing literature on market interaction of firms primarily deal with the tools to manage inter-firm relationships. The idea here is to explore other factors that may act as a driver to form a comfort zone for the firms engaging in business. In this study we identify one such factor to be leadership style and conceptualize how different styles of leadership, can influence an employee of an organization to adopt the same leadership style while interacting with external firms like clients, suppliers, agencies etc. and expect them to comply with the same. However, since this requires a substantial change in mindset of the external agency, they would only be motivated to comply in order to earn the relevant institutional legitimacy. Given this context we try to evaluate if the leadership contagion will have symmetrical spillover on the multiple external firms or be contingent on the extent of power dependence and/or the type of role (Principal/Agency) they are playing.