Published on: July 18, 2025 at 3:24 pm
When the president or CEO is getting up there in age, organizations face a crossroads: The success or failure of succession-planning and leadership transition often hinges on the degree of the outgoing leader’s support for those processes.
Academy of Management Scholar Donald Hambrick of Pennsylvania State University, who published an article in Academy of Management Review on this topic, said the inspiration for the research was the insight that CEOs have different deep-down feelings and beliefs about their professional mortality and desire to be involved in who their successors will be.
“If we think about those as two things, one’s ability to think about others’ and their own mortality and their willingness or eagerness to be involved in picking a successor, as there are various combinations, a total of a total of four different combinations, in fact, including the most sinister—the person who just can’t fathom ever going away,” Hambrick said.
“The CEO can’t even think about retirement and so sabotages succession efforts or may get involved in succession-planning efforts half-heartedly but end up sabotaging the most promising one or two people—that’s one pathology,” he said.
Another kind of pathology is demonstrated by leaders who have a hand-picked successor or want to hire a particular type of executive—a vision that may not align with that of the board and other top leaders.
“One of the other types we uncovered was the person, the incumbent CEO, who’s very prepared to think about eventual departure, so no problem there, but has very concrete ideas about who the replacement should be,” Hambrick said. “Of course, lo and behold, the replacement is often somebody who’s essentially a clone of the incumbent themselves.
“So you can see how these different combinations can give rise to all sorts of problems in the executive ranks among people who would love to be considered as CEOs,” he said. “It creates real problems for boards, and boards often have a hard time confronting an incumbent about succession, especially if the incumbent is performing well.”
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A sample of Hambrick’s AOM research findings: