Institute of Management, GSEM, University of Thomas Fischer is Associate Professor of Responsible Leadership at the Geneva School of Economics and Management (GSEM), University of Geneva. He is also the Yearly Review Editor of The Leadership Quartely, which is the premier journal fully dedicated to leadership research and for the same journal he is currently co- editing a special issue on measuring leadership beyond questionnaires. Thomas received his PhD in Management from the University of Lausanne. Prior to his doctoral research, Thomas obtained a master’s degree in Mathematics from the Technical University Munich, Germany, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and another bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the Catholic University Eichstaett- Ingolstadt, Germany.
Thomas’ work focuses on two topics. First, he studies the conceptualization and measurement of leadership styles. He finds that vast parts of the evidence that supports advice to lead authentically, ethically, or with a transformational style, or more generally, in a “positive” way, is simply wrong. He also offers better concepts and measures of leadership styles. Second, Thomas studies how people talk about (their) leadership. He finds that many people engage in such talk in an effort to appear moral and rational, but do not live up to what they preach—although they are not necessarily hypocrites.
Thomas’ work has appeared in the Academy of Management Annals, Journal of Management, and The Leadership Quarterly. His Annals-paper is currently listed among the four most read articles of this journal; one of his Leadership Quarterly articles won the best paper award in this journal, and another one was the first runner-up for the same award. Moreover, Thomas is an ad-hoc reviewer for the Swiss National Science Foundation as well as for several prestigious journals, including the Journal of Management Studies, the Journal of Business Ethics, the International Journal of Management Reviews, the Organizational Psychology Review, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
