Since arriving at CSU a few years ago, management professor Kevin Hurt has steadily built up a portfolio of leadership research that is unmatched in the Turner College. Hurt's research in this field began in 2009, prior to completing a doctorate, with a publication in the Journal of Business & Leadership examining the effects of contrasting leadership styles on the behavior of team members in different group settings. In that study, Hurt and his co-author controlled for two leadership styles (directive and transformational) and two types of teams (functional and cross-functional) within an experiment to assess their impact on perceptions of procedural and interpersonal justice. The results suggested that leadership style and group type have different effects on team members' perceptions of procedural justice and interpersonal justice.
Hurt rejoined his leadership research program in 2015, with a publication in the Journal of Business & Entrepreneurship addressing the entrepreneur-opportunity match needed to increase the likelihood of success when a specific opportunity is selected. Hurt's model proposes that the closer the entrepreneur’s characteristics, such as knowledge, skills, abilities, and opportunity recognition, match those of the opportunity, such as financial capital and market realities, the greater the possibility of attaining a strong fit. In turn, this can lead to venture success. Lastly, cultural fit and prior start-up experience are proposed to moderate the venture’s success.
The Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies also published work by Hurt and his co-author in 2015. This study investigates the effects of cognitive and affective conflict on two important attributes of perceived strategic decision effectiveness: perceived strategic decision quality and commitment. Hurt and his co-author identify cognitive conflict as a nonlinear phenomenon and test whether the presence of an organizational crisis alters the relationship between conflict types (cognitive and affective) and perceived decision quality and commitment. Their analysis of data from 264 executives comprising a total of 64 strategic decision-making (SDM) teams indicates that the effect of cognitive conflict on perceived strategic decision outcomes is, in fact, nonlinear. Furthermore, the findings of the study also revealed that organizational crisis is a significant moderator of the relationship between both level of cognitive and affective conflict and perceived strategic decision quality.
In 2016 Hurt added a solo study in Human Resource Development International positing that the degree to which an organization invests in training initiatives, as well as the percentage of training transference and maintenance, is a function of top management team composition, top management team characteristics, and the degree to which the top management team holds subordinate managers accountable. To set up the contribution of the study, Hurt points out that training is considered an important tool for organizations as they attempt to gain competitive advantages. However, transferring and maintaining the acquired skills and knowledge to the workforce remain problematic. Managerial support is a factor influencing training and its transference. However, the role of top management teams in this process has largely been ignored.
Hurt added two publications to his leadership research program in 2017, with one appearing in the International Journal of Servant-Leadership and the other appearing in the Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship. In the first of these he and his co-author explain that the pressure placed on a firm's leadership to achieve profits, particularly those in the short-term, often leads leaders to turn to power-centric, autocratic leadership styles to direct the firm's operations. Since executive rewards are often quite robust and typically tied to the achievement of organizational goals, the temptation to manipulate the organization's subordinates for personal interest is ever looming in perilous proximity to the leadership position. To explore this phenomenon, Hurt and his co-author review prior literature on the history of servant leadership and character in leadership.
In a 2018 piece appearing in Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, Hurt and his co-author integrate theories of conflict, affect, and attribution within the domain of decision-making to gain a greater understanding of how and why organizational conflicts are at times positive, negative, or neutral. Specifically, they posit that the conclusions individuals reach as a result of their attributions, and their subsequent emotions and behavioral responses, play a significant role in determining conflict's effects. The study goes on to apply theories of team-level emotional convergence to propose how the individual emotional responses of team members may converge into a collective emotional response at the team level.
After adding a second paper in 2019 in the International Journal of Servant-Leadership, Hurt published a piece in Evidence-Based HRM investigating the mediating effects of perceived organizational support, job embeddedness, and job satisfaction on the relationship between servant leadership and turnover intentions. Survey data collected by Hurt and his co-authors revealed that perceived organizational support and embeddedness are mediating mechanisms through which servant leadership is related to employee turnover intentions, a finding that points to a better understanding of the complex ways in which followers respond to servant leadership.
In both 2022 and 2023 Hurt and co-authors published studies appearing in the Journal of Values-Based Leadership. The most recent of these two reviews how positional authority affects the servant leadership-organizational performance relationship and provides insight on how servant leadership can be implemented and effective in the absence of positional authority (i.e., through the cultivation and leveraging of influence). Through the lens of upper echelon theory as well as research on the performance of organizations whose executive teams practice servant leadership, Hurt and his co-author develop a model making the case that positional authority is an important moderator of the relationship between servant leadership and organizational performance. Their model also considers the contingency that not all leaders in an organization are in a position of authority.
Finally, last year was a big one for Hurt's leadership research program. First, his co-authored paper in Conflict Resolution Quarterly develops a theoretical model and evidence-based propositions depicting the interrelationships between servant leadership, organizational trust, and affective conflict. The authors position affective conflict as a negative moderating influence between servant leadership and organizational trust and, importantly, they present a solution to mitigate the negative effects of affective conflict. Second, his paper appearing in American Business Review explains that advocates of servant leadership maintain that altruism is the foundational ethic fueling the success of the servant leader. Thus, the foremost requirement of a servant leader is the possession of a concern for others. Researchers have largely neglected the possibility that servant leaders may be, at least partially, motivated by self-interest. Hurt and his co-author challenge this foundational ethic attributed with servant leadership and put forth a new ethical perspective. Reviewing four motivational states, from purely other-centered to purely self-centered, they introduce a conceptual model arguing that the proper ethic to ascribe with servant leadership is a dual motivational perspective of rational self-interest and agapao love. A dual motivational perspective allows the servant leader to avoid the negative consequences of the self-sacrificial, altruistic motivation while maintaining the positive, pro-social behaviors that improve organizational outcomes associated with servant leadership.
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