Research Interest

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Biography

Katharina Balazs is Associate Professor of Strategy and Organization at the ESCP Europe Paris campus. Of Hungarian and Swedish origin, she holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration from HEC, Jouy en Josas, an MBA and M.Sc. from INSEAD, Fontainebleau and an MS from The University of Vienna, Austria.
Before joining ESCP Europe in 2001, she has worked as an organizational consultant in Scandinavia and Central Europe where was specialized on strategic and cross-cultural management issues in companies undergoing international mergers and acquisitions.
She is the author and co-author of several books, articles, cases, and research papers on leadership, organizational excellence, downsizing, and organization transformation and change. Her other research interests are entrepreneurship, cross-cultural management, and creativity, innovation in organizations. Her current research on the great chefs in and outside France focuses upon the roles of leadership and innovation in achieving organizational excellence. She is also active in executive development focusing on leadership and cross-cultural management in multicultural organizations.

See Katharina Balazs' video on her book, Ils ont décroché les étoiles (Pearson Village Mondial, 256 p., 2009) (in French).

See Katharina Balazs' video Leadership in Crisis.

Current research

When we plunge into the organizational literature on leadership we quickly become lost in a labyrinth: there are endless definitions, countless articles and never-ending polemics. The proliferation of literature on effective leadership, however, has not been equaled by its relevance. One of the problems has been that too many theories about organizations seem to plodding and detached, often far removed from the reality of day-to-day life. My main research interest is to attempt to go beyond the confinement of social science laboratory experiments to observe real leaders in action, and to ask the questions: what do leaders really do? What makes people follow leaders? Why do certain leaders build more effective organizations than others? And how do they do it?
My current research explores the way in which character traits and behavioral patterns affect the leadership and management style of the world’s most outstanding chefs. Some of the elements that make for successful leadership are presented. It is suggested that the personality of a leader, especially the case in smaller, entrepreneurial organizations, influences the management style, strategy, corporate culture and even structure of his or her organization to such an extent that often organizations cannot perform successfully if no attention is given to a leader's intrapsychic world. The complex psychological forces that make up the personality of the chefs are the real keys to understanding the functioning of three-star restaurants.
Consequently, I explore the role of unconscious motivation and the impact of their childhood experiences on their adult behavior and leadership style. One way of doing this is that of "text," by which is meant groupings of interrelated information and of all types of data containing messages and themes that can be systematized. In “decoding” these texts, significance is extracted from interrelated factual, cognitive, and affective units constructed out of the researcher's experiences with the people in the business. Texts can include both the obvious, such as managerial statements, writings, organizational structure, and observable behavior, and the implicit, such as symbolic behavior, organizational myths, specific strategic decisions, and particular interpersonal styles. All these give clues to what life in a three-star restaurant is all about. In my research, I integrate textual analysis with an existing body of literature on leadership, executive behavior, group dynamics, power and politics, organizational design, culture, and strategy to explain the leadership style of the great chefs and consequently the way they build outstanding restaurants.

See Katharina Balazs' video on her book, Ils ont décroché les étoiles (Pearson Village Mondial, 256 p., 2009).

Publications