Profile

Dr. Lorenz Graf-Vlachy holds the Professorship for Strategic Management and Leadership at TU Dortmund University and is Affiliate Faculty and a Senior Research Fellow at ESCP Business School, as well as an International Research Fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation.

Dr. Graf-Vlachy’s work has been published in, for example, Organization Science, the Academy of Management Review, the Strategic Management Journal, the Journal of Management, the Journal of Management Studies, Academy of Management Discoveries, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management. He serves on various editorial boards including for the Academy of Management Review and the Journal of Management. Going beyond the field of management, he has also published in information systems (e.g., ECIS, ICIS), software engineering (e.g., TOSEM, ICSE-NIER), and medical outlets (e.g., International Journal of Social Psychiatry). His work has been covered by various news media, including the Financial Times, Handelsblatt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Harvard Business Manager, Forbes, and Fortune.

Prior to his current appointment, he was Professor and Chair of Strategy at ESCP Business School in Berlin. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Passau. He also held visiting positions at various institutions, for instance Harvard University, UC Berkeley, and Columbia Business School. He received fellowships from the Schoeller Research Center for Business and Society and the Jackstädt Foundation, and he gave invited talks at various institutions including Tsinghua University, Imperial College London, Rotterdam School of Management, CEIBS, VU Amsterdam, the US Army War College, ESADE, and the University of Oxford. He taught at HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Business and ESMT Berlin and performs executive education programs for leading international companies.

Before his academic career, Dr. Graf-Vlachy was a Project Leader at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in Munich, working on strategy and organization projects. He was repeatedly invited to work with the BCG Henderson Institute in New York and was selected for a year-long secondment to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Geneva.

He gained additional experience in Germany, China, and the U.S., working for McKinsey & Company, various IT firms, and a publishing house. He also started a small software company that he sold to a U.S. competitor.

Dr. Graf-Vlachy holds a master’s level degree in Information Systems and a doctoral degree from FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg as well as a habilitation from the University of Passau. He also studied at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and at Tongji University in Shanghai.

He is a member of various academic societies, including the Academy of Management, the Strategic Management Society, the IEEE (senior member), and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Publications

Key publications
  • “Women’s and Men’s Authorship Experiences: A Prospective Meta-Analysis,” with G.C. Banks et al., Journal of Management, forthcoming.
  • “Understanding the Antecedents of CEO Regulatory Focus,” with F. Neville, C. Short, & F.X. Völkl, Journal of Management Studies, forthcoming. DownloadLink
  • “Multi-CEOs: A Legitimacy Perspective on Executives Running Multiple Firms,” with S. Hensellek, & P. Haack, Academy of Management Discoveries, forthcoming. DownloadLink
  • “Narcissism at the CEO–TMT Interface: A New Narcissism Measure and a Test of the Consequences of Executive Narcissism for TMT Composition,” with S. Junge, M. Hagen, & F. Schlichte, Journal of Management, forthcoming. DownloadLink
  • “Kindred Spirits: Cognitive Frame Similarity and Good Faith Provisions in Strategic Alliance Contracts,” with M. Hanisch, C. Haeussler, A. König, & T. Cho, Strategic Management Journal, 2025, 46(2): 436–469. DownloadLink
  • “The Innovator’s Media Dilemma: How Journalists Cover Incumbents’ Adoption of Discontinuous Technologies,” with A. König, R. Banfield, M. Rauch, & A. Boutalikakis, Journal of Product Innovation Management, 2023, 40(1): 3–29. DownloadLink
  • “Opportunity/Threat Perception and Inertia in Response to Discontinuous Change: Replicating and Extending Gilbert (2005),” with A. König, & M. Schöberl, Journal of Management, 2021, 47(3): 771–816. DownloadLink
  • “Effects of an Advancing Tenure on CEO Cognitive Complexity,” with J. Bundy, & D.C. Hambrick, Organization Science, 2020, 31(4): 936–959. DownloadLink
  • “Media Coverage of Firms: Background, Integration, and Directions for Future Research,” with A.G. Oliver, R. Banfield, A. König, & J. Bundy, Journal of Management, 2020, 46(1): 36–69. DownloadLink
  • “A Blessing and a Curse: How CEOs’ Trait Empathy Affects Their Management of Organizational Crises,” with A. König, J. Bundy, & L.M. Little, Academy of Management Review, 2020, 45(1): 130–153. DownloadLink
  • “Institution-Infused Sensemaking of Discontinuous Innovations: The Case of the Sharing Economy,” with F. Weber, J. Lehmann, & A. König, Journal of Product Innovation Management, 2019, 36(5): 632–660. Link
  • “Primary or complex? Towards a theory of metaphorical strategy communication in MNCs,” with A. König, A. Fehn, & J. Puck, Journal of World Business, 2017, 52(2): 270–285. DownloadLink
Other journal publications and archival conference contributions
  • “Coming Full Circle on Cash Holdings and Firm Value: A Comment on Kim and Bettis (2014), Theissen et al. (2023), and Souder et al. (2024),” with C. Jung, Journal of Management Scientific Reports, 2024. DownloadLink
  • “Strategic Leader Reputation: A Review and Research Agenda,” with L. Kamp, Management Review Quarterly, 2024. DownloadLink
  • “Incumbents’ Reaction to Anticipated Discontinuous Regulatory Change: The Case of Scope 3 CO2 Reporting in the European Steel Industry,” with M. Hettler, Journal of Cleaner Production, 2024. DownloadLink
  • “This Paper Had the Smartest Reviewers – Flattery Detection Utilising an Audio-Textual Transformer-Based Approach,” with L. Christ, S. Amiriparian, F. Hawighorst, A.-K. Schill, A. Boutalikakis, A. König, & B. Schuller, Proceedings of Interspeech, 2024, 3530–3534. DownloadLink
  • “Cleaning Up Confounding: Correcting for Endogeneity Using Instrumental Variables and Two-Stage Models,” with S. Wagner, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2024, 33(8): 199. DownloadLink
  • “Different Debt: An Addition to the Technical Debt Dataset and a Demonstration Using Developer Personality,” with S. Wagner, Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt), 2024, 31–35. DownloadLink
  • “Endogeneity, Instruments, and Two-Stage Models,” with S. Wagner, Proceedings of the 46th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) (Poster), 2024, 274–275. DownloadLink
  • “Cash Holdings and Firm Value: Evidence for Increasing Marginal Returns,” with C. Jung, M. Theissen, & H. Theissen, Journal of Management Scientific Reports, 2023, 3–4: 260–300. DownloadLink
  • “The Type to Listen to The Machine? The Effect of Personality on the (Under-)Utilization of AI Advice,” with S. Asbach & A. Fügener, Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Business Informatics (Internationale Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik), 2023. Link
  • “Seizing the Potential of Algorithms: The Power of Personalized Persuasive Messages on the Use of Algorithmic Advice,” with S. Asbach & A. Fügener, Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Business Informatics (Internationale Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik), 2023. Link
  • “Corporate Scope 3 Carbon Emission Reporting as an Enabler of Supply Chain Decarbonization: A Critical Review and Comprehensive Research Agenda,” with M. Hettler, Business Strategy and the Environment, 2023. DownloadLink
  • “Integrating Digital Platform Dynamics into the Next Wave of Customer Orientation Research,” with J.S. Kiefer, C. Castell, S. Schubach, J.H. Schumann, & A. König, Journal of Business Research, 2023, 163: 113911. Link
  • “The Type to Take Out a Loan? A Study of Developer Personality and Technical Debt,” with S. Wagner, Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt), 2023, 27–36. DownloadLink
  • “The Risk-Taking Software Engineer: A Framed Portrait,” Proceedings of the 45th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results (ICSE-NIER), 2023, 25–30. DownloadLink
  • “Mental health symptoms and coping strategies among Ukrainians during the Russia-Ukraine war in March 2022,” with W. Xu, I. Pavlova, X. Chen, P. Petrytsa, & S.X. Zhang, International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 2023, 69(4): 957–966. DownloadLink
  • “Early evidence on the mental health of Ukrainian civilian and professional combatants during the Russian invasion,” with I. Pavlova, P. Petrytsa, S. Wang, & S.X. Zhang, European Psychiatry, 2022, 65(1): E79. DownloadLink
  • “Battle of the Blocs: Quantity and Quality of Software Engineering Research by Origin,” Proceedings of the 29th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC), 2022, 590–591. DownloadLink
  • “The Family Innovator’s Dilemma Revisited: Examining the Effects of Family Influence on Incumbents’ Adoption of Discontinuous Technologies,” with J. Szewczyk, C. Kurzhals, N. Kammerlander, & A. König, Journal of Family Business Strategy, 2022, 13(4): 100516. Link
  • “Is the Readability of Abstracts Decreasing in Management Research?,” Review of Managerial Science, 2022, 16: 1063–1084. DownloadLink
  • “Institutional Work Battles in the Sharing Economy: Unveiling Actors and Discursive Strategies in Media Discourse,” with J. Lehmann, F. Weber, M. Waldkirch, & A. König, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 2022, 184: 122002. Link
  • “Analyst Flattery, CEO Narcissism, and CEO Communication Specificity,” with A.-K. Schill, A. Boutalikakis, F. Hawighorst, & A. König, Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, 2022. Link
  • “Predicting Managers’ Mental Health across Countries: Using Country-level COVID-19 Statistics,” with L. Li, & S.X. Zhang, Frontiers in Public Health, 2022, 10: 791977. DownloadLink
  • “Text and Team: What Article Metadata Characteristics Drive Citations in Software Engineering?,” with D. Graziotin & S. Wagner, Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE), 2022, 20–29. DownloadLink
  • “If and Where: Environmental Antecedents of CDO Adoption,” with V. Hossnofsky & S. Junge, GI Lecture Notes in Informatics, 2022, Vol. P-319: 83–96. DownloadLink
  • “The Politics of Piracy: Political Ideology as a Predictor of Online Media Piracy,” with T. Goyal, Y. Ouardi, & A. König, Information Technology and Management, 2022, 23: 51–63. DownloadLink
  • “Strategic Leadership in Organizational Crises: A Review and Research Agenda,” with L. Schaedler & A. König, Long Range Planning, 2022, 55(2): 102156. DownloadLink
  • “Chief Digital Officers: The State of the Art and the Road Ahead,” with L. Kessel, Management Review Quarterly, 2022, 72: 1249–1286. DownloadLink
  • “The Readability of Information Systems Research over Three Decades: An Analysis of the Senior Scholars’ Basket of Journals from 1990 to 2020,” Proceedings of the Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS), 2021. DownloadLink
  • “The Impact of Perceived Entrepreneur Cognitive Complexity on Venture-Capital Financing,” with F. Demann, M. Diessner, & A. König, Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, 2021. Link
  • “Chief Digital Officers - Review and Research Agenda,” with L. Kessel, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Business Informatics (Internationale Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik), 2021. DownloadLink
  • “Reviews Left and Right: The Link Between Reviewers’ Political Ideology and Online Review Language,” with T. Goyal, Y. Ouardi, & A. König, Business & Information Systems Engineering, 2021, 63(4): 403–417. DownloadLink
  • “The Illusion of Independence: Spun-Off Firms’ Risk-Taking as a Function of Status and Attachment to the Parent Firm,” with S. Junge, J. Mammen, R. Meinhardt, & C. Gudd, Long Range Planning, 2021, 54(1): 101966. DownloadLink
  • “Strategic Leadership and Technological Innovation: A Comprehensive Review and Research Agenda,” with C. Kurzhals, & A. König, Corporate Governance: An International Review, 2020, 28(6): 437–464. DownloadLink
  • “Predictors of managers’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic,” with S. Sun, & S.X. Zhang, European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 2020, 11(1): 1834195. DownloadLink
  • “Social media use as a predictor of handwashing during a pandemic: Evidence from Covid-19 in Malaysia,” with S.X. Zhang, K.H. Looi, R. Su, J. Li, Epidemiology & Infection, 2020, 148: e261. DownloadLink
  • “The Double-Edged Effects of Top Managers’ Commitment to the Status Quo on Firms’ Crisis Resolution,” with F. Struck, L. Milinski, L. Schaedler, & A. König, Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, 2019. Link
  • “Talking Institutions in the Sharing Economy: A Content Analysis in the Print Media and a Taxonomy of Discursive Strategies,” with J. Lehmann, F. Weber, & A. König, Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), 2019. DownloadLink
  • “Like Student Like Manager? Using Student Subjects in Managerial Debiasing Research,” Review of Managerial Science, 2019, 13(2): 347–376. DownloadLink
  • “Mechanisms of Engagement With, and Disengagement From, Internet Applications: A Qualitative Study of Online Job Search,” with A. Reinartz, K. Buhtz, & A. König, Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), 2018. DownloadLink
  • “The Influence of Cognitive Frame Similarity on Contingency Planning in Strategic Alliances,” with M. Hanisch, C. Haeussler, A. König, & T. Cho, Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, 2018. Link
  • “Social Influence in Technology Adoption Research: Taking Stock and Moving Forward,” with K. Buhtz, & A. König, Management Review Quarterly, 2018, 68(1): 37–76. DownloadLink
  • “Political Ideology as a Predictor of Online Media Piracy,” with T. Goyal, Y. Ouardi, & A. König, Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), 2017. DownloadLink
  • “Social Influence in Technology Adoption Research: A Literature Review and Research Agenda,” with K. Buhtz, Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), 2017. DownloadLink
  • “The Cost of Sharing: The Effect of Sharing Inclination on Information Overload,” with Y. Ouardi, T. Goyal, J. Mammen, A. König, & C. Saunders, Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), 2016. DownloadLink
  • “Political Ideology as a Predictor of Online Consumer Review Characteristics,” with T. Goyal, Y. Ouardi, & A. König, Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), 2016. DownloadLink
  • “Parallel Patterns: What Organizations Can Learn From Supercomputers,” Management+Innovation (formerly Business+Innovation), 2014, 5(1): 34–39. Download
  • “Second-Order Digital Inequality: The Case of E-Commerce,” with K. Buhtz, A. Reinartz, A. König, & J. Mammen, Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), 2014. DownloadLink
  • “Debiasing competitive irrationality: How managers can be prevented from trading off absolute for relative profit,” with A. König, A. Enders, & H. Hungenberg, European Management Journal, 2012, 30(4): 386–403. DownloadLink
  • “Conceptualizing Envy for Business Research,” Advances in Business-Related Scientific Research Journal, 2010, 1(2): 129–134. Download
  • “Modelle für die Outsourcing-Entscheidung von Softwareentwicklungsprojekten (Models for outsourcing decisions of software development projects),” with M. Amberg & M. Wiener, GI Lecture Notes in Informatics, 2005, Vol. P-68: 248–252. DownloadLink
Contributions to edited volumes
  • “Because I’m Punk! How NOFX Navigated Its Social Evaluations among Punks,” with T.G. Pollock, in: E. Bernhard, S. Morello, & D. Pearson (Eds.), NOFX: Forty Years of “Problematic” Punk Provocations, 185–201, 2025, New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic.
  • “Digital Platforms, Ecosystems, and Strategic Leadership,” with A. Shylina & A. König, in: Z. Simsek, C. Heavy, & B. Fox (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Strategic Leadership in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 267–309, 2024, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Link
  • “Künstliche Intelligenz: Strategische Herausforderungen für etablierte Unternehmen,” with J. Wolff, A. Keck, A. König, & J. Menacher, in: R. Obermaier (ed.), Handbuch Industrie 4.0 und Digitale Transformation: Betriebswirtschaftliche, technische und rechtliche Herausforderungen, 505–528, 2019, Wiesbaden: SpringerGabler. Link
  • “Industrie 4.0: Strategische Innovation durch Strategische Sensitivität,” with A. König, in: R. Obermaier (ed.), Industrie 4.0 als unternehmerische Gestaltungsaufgabe, 53–67, 2016, Wiesbaden: SpringerGabler, also reprinted in 2nd edition. Link
Selected practitioner-oriented publications
  • “How CEOs’ job demands influence how they pursue goals,” with F. Neville, C. Short, & F.-X. Völkl Management Studies Insights Blog, 2024. Link
  • “Good Faith Provisions in Strategic Alliance Contracts: The Role of Alliance Partners’ Cognitive Frame Similarity Oxford Business Law Blog, 2024. Link
  • “When Do Firms Use Good Faith Provisions in Strategic Alliance Contracts?,” with M. Hanisch, C. Häussler, A. König, & T. Cho Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog, 2024. Link
  • “What happens in the top management team when the CEO is a narcissist,” LSE Business Review, 2024. Link
  • “Why firms are not reporting their Scope 3 CO2 emissions,” with M. Hettler, California Management Review Insights, 2024. Link
  • “Why Cash is King for Firms,” LSE Business Review, 2024. Link
  • “Managers’ mental health during the pandemic – the good, the bad, and the ugly,” LSE Business Review, 2021. Link
  • “Competitive Irrationality: When Being Better Is a Bad Strategy,” Rutgers Business Review, 2021, 6(1): 37–43. DownloadLink
  • “Does the partisan divide extend to online reviews?,” LSE Business Review, 2021. Link
  • “Everything’s changing – or is it?,” The Choice, 2021. Link
  • “Preparing for the world after Covid-19: Leadership lessons from crises and discontinuous change,” LSE Business Review, 2021. Link
  • “How independent are business spin-offs, really?,” The Conversation, 2020. Link
  • “Transitioning to a post-COVID19 world: Lessons for leaders from crises and discontinuous change,” ESCP Impact Papers, 2020. Download
  • “Gewinnen ist nicht alles: Warum soziale Vergleiche manchmal tückisch sind,” Wirtschaftspsychologie aktuell, 2019. Download
  • Connected World: Hyperconnected Travel and Transportation in Action, with T. Chiesa, P. Sayler, J. Lehtinen, J. Moavenzadeh, A. Mei-Pochtler, N. Lang, M. Rüssmann, & J. Riedl, 2104, Geneva: World Economic Forum. Download
  • “Avoiding the Traps of Competitive Irrationality,” with A. Enders, A. König, IMD Tomorrow’s Challenges, 2013, reprinted in Business Spectator and The Jakarta Post. Link
  • “Programming Organizations for Performance,” BCG Strategy Gallery, 2013. Link