Strategic leadership and organizational design: a review and research agenda

Abstract Strategic leaders shape organizations. Besides decisions on strategic direction, growth ambitions, or cost structure, their choice of organizational design lays the foundation for company performance. Although organizational design has been widely studied, work linking strategic leadership to organizational design remains dispersed across multiple perspectives, limiting cumulative understanding of this relationship. In this systematic literature review, we synthesize existing research on how strategic leaders and their specific characteristics impact organizational design, how organizational design influences strategic leaders and their behavior, and how firm- and environmental-level characteristics condition these relationships. We identify the key mechanisms underlying the observed relationships, clarify how different theoretical perspectives explain them, and highlight where existing research provides only limited accounts. Building on this synthesis, we develop an integrative framework that clarifies the current state of research including directionality and mechanisms across theoretical perspectives. Lastly, we propose an extensive and forward-looking research agenda offering conceptual scaffolding and novel research ideas for advancing scholarly work in this field.