Time: 14:00–16:00, April 2, 2026

Venue: Room 216, Guanli Building

Lecture Topic: Gravitational Force of Charisma: Leaders’ Social Capital Beyond Team Boundaries

Speaker Profile

Dr. Xu Huang earned his Bachelor’s degree in Management from Lingnan University in Hong Kong (China), Master of Arts in Organizational Behaviour and Analysis from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, and Doctorate in Organizational Psychology from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Currently, he serves as Associate Dean of the School of Business, chair professor of Management, director of the DBA Programme, and director of the Centre for Human Resource Strategy and Development at Hong Kong Baptist University. He holds concurrent academic editorial and society leadership roles: vice president of the International Association for Chinese Management Research (IACMR), consulting editor of Management and Organization Review, and editorial board member of Academy of Management Journal and Human Relations. Dr. Huang’s research focuses on leadership, power, employee proactive and deviant behaviour, employee well-being and emotions, cross-cultural organizational psychology, and management issues within Chinese organizations. He has published over 80 articles in top international peer-reviewed journals, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of International Business Studies, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Management, The Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, and Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. In 2024, he was once again honored among the World’s Top 2% Most Influential Scientists by Stanford University.

Lecture Abstract

Social network theory suggests that a leader’s impact on performance extends beyond direct influence on their teams; it is also a function of their effectiveness in cultivating social ties across team boundaries. Little is known about the source of leaders’ capacity to build and leverage boundary-transcending network influence. Reviving the Weberian concept of leader charisma, we argue that charisma distinctly influences a leader’s influence network by reaching beyond immediate relationships to attract followers across organizational boundaries. This expanded social network, in turn, strengthens the leader’s team performance. Leveraging on a unique, time-lagged, multi-source dataset of 672 employees nested within 116 sale teams across 37 subsidiaries in two major provinces in China, we find that charismatic leadership is positively associated with team leaders’ centrality within the broader organizational network, and this centrality predicts stronger team performance. Moreover, the indirect effect of charismatic leadership on performance via network centrality is amplified in politically charged work environments, where uncertainty and self-interest behaviors prevail.