INTRODUCTION

Does organizational performance require that strategic leaders cultivate a robust view of the future? Or does strategy-making rely more on broad sense-making or managerial response to internal realities, over environmental considerations (Daft & Weick, 1984; Fiol & Huff, 1992; Weick, 1979, 1995)? 

Since the mid-1980s, a growing body of leadership research has focused on strategic leadership, in contrast to supervisory leadership (House & Aditya, 1997). It asks how top leadership makes decisions in the short-run that guarantees the long-term viability of the organization. The field is known as upper echelon, top management team (TMT) (Hambrick & Mason 1984) or strategic leadership theory (Finkelstein & Hambrick, 1996). Several review of literatures exist (Cannella & Monroe, 1997; Carpenter, Geletkanycz & Sanders, 2004) and one covers its relationship to transformational and charismatic leadership (Boal & Hooiberg, 2001). Ireland and Hitt (1999) define strategic leadership as "a person's ability to anticipate, envision, maintain flexibility, think strategically, and work with others to initiate changes that will create a viable future for the organization" (p. 43).
 
Defining the concept of strategic leadership is one thing, developing its construct has proved more difficult. Being a relatively new field in management theory, measurement has been a low priority (Boyd, Gove & Hitt, 2005). Researchers acknowledge strategic leadership "is a complex, multifaceted competency that has many nuances and subtleties, making it difficult to easily codify" (Hitt & Ireland, 2002, p. 4). The same is true for foresight or futures research. This difficulty is due in part to the broad scope of strategic leadership, which can encompass structure, organization or environmental variables. This demands a more holistic perspective than usually is found in leader-follower or supervisory theories of leadership (e.g. path-goal, contingency, LMX). The research question facing this field, therefore, is "not whether strategic leadership matters, but rather under what conditions, when, how and on what criteria" (Boal & Hooiberg, 2000, p. 518), and how does foresight relate to this capacity?

In order to develop the concept of strategic foresight into a viable construct and advance its measurement, a path diagram of three variables is offered:

a) an independent variable is strategic leadership, measured by the Leaderplex model (Hooijberg, Hunt & Dodge, 1997),

b) an outcome variable of organizational performance, gauged by financial measures, and

c) a mediator variable of foresight, measured by Future Time Perspective (Gjesme, 1983; Seijts, 1998).

Associated with the model are testable propositions, hypothesizing that there will be a positive relationship between strategic leadership, foresight schemas and organizational performance.

If through theory-testing this model was found to be statistically significant, this could help shareholders and top management teams, or anyone concerned with boosting organizational performance through foresight methodologies.