Succession planning: does it matter in the context of corporate leadership?

Corporations invest heavily in human resource management infrastructures intended amongst other things to provide for the future leadership needs of the corporation. Adopting well-known succession planning techniques, human resource managers routinely engage in corporate leadership identification and development processes, open directly involving the chief executive officer. This paper reports on a tendency for chief executive officers not to take all that much notice of these processes when making appointments to their, own senior leadership teams. Drawing on three institutional case studies and in-depth interview data with the 12 chief executive officers, the paper shows that what appears to matter most in these appointments is likely impact of a leadership appointment on corporate profitability, though other pet leadership criteria may also be applied. The paper discusses the implications of this situation for human resource managers.