Ryan O. Miller

The future of work is usually told as a story about technology: think automation, algorithms, or AI. But as machines take over more of what leaders do, what remains distinctly human about leadership matters more than ever. My research foregrounds this human side through a central focus on communal leadership: developing others, prioritizing collective goals, or leading in service of the team and the organization rather than the self. Some of the questions driving my work include: How does communality shape leaders' rise into top roles? How does gender influence what organizations expect and reward in their leaders? And, when does showing one's human side, including admitting flaws, make leaders more effective?

I am a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Organizational Behavior and the Head of Research at the University of Zurich's Center for Leadership in the Future of Work. I pursue these questions using mixed methods, from inductive interview studies to experiments, and examine the consequences of these dynamics for followership, leader development, and organizations more broadly. My research has appeared in the Journal of Business Ethics, The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, and Personnel Assessment and Decisions, with ongoing work conditionally accepted at Academy of Management Journal and in preparation for submission to Administrative Science Quarterly.

In my doctoral dissertation, I interviewed 43 women hospital CEOs and 10 board chairs involved in their appointments to understand how these women ascended into the top role. Approaching the data inductively, I found that participants' accounts primarily pointed to communal (rather than agentic) leadership behavior as the central component linked to their upward career mobility. I situate this behavioral account within institutional contexts, examining how factors such as a communal organizational mission, the gender composition of an industry, or organizational structure create leadership demands that communal behavior is particularly well suited to meet. I am currently developing this work into a manuscript, incorporating feedback from paper development workshops including one hosted by Organization Science (Hong Kong, 2025), and anticipate submission in late 2026.