Agreements and Disagreements about the Roll of Leadership Team Diversity in Strategic Change: A Critical Review of Measurement and Empirical Inconsistencies

Research examining the relationship between leadership team diversity and strategic change has produced inconsistent and often contradictory findings. This dissertation digest synthesizes prior research through a meta-analytic review of twenty-five studies representing more than 500,000 observations across multiple industries and countries. The results indicate that relationships between leadership team diversity characteristics and strategic change are generally small in magnitude and highly variable across studies. Rather than reflecting a clear directional effect, these patterns point to a fundamental challenge in the existing literature: inconsistency in how key constructs are defined and measured. Strategic change is operationalized through a wide range of financial, event-based, perceptual, and industry-specific indicators, while leadership diversity characteristics are measured using varied, often aggregated approaches. These differences limit comparability across studies and contribute to a lack of empirical convergence. This study reframes the relationship between leadership team diversity and strategic change as a problem of measurement and comparability rather than one of purely theoretical disagreement. Identifying areas of agreement and divergence across prior research highlights the importance of greater conceptual clarity and methodological consistency for advancing understanding in this domain.