The aim of the work of the EDHEC Leadership & Corporate Governance Research Centre is to respond to a very concrete question posed by management teams: How to earn the legitimacy to lead in a context, that of governance reform, in which power is questioned or even fought over by shareholders, employees, regulators, journalists, analysts, and others?

The mission of the EDHEC Leadership & Corporate Governance Research Centre is to shed light on leadership and corporate governance in a period of governance and leadership reform. This mission leads to:

- The production of academic knowledge of the management legitimacy/leadership practices and of corporate governance practices.

- The development of seminars designed to prepare managers and their teams to respond to the managerial challenges posed by current changes in corporate governance.

From an academic point of view, and against the grain of the current philosophy of governance and of a disciplinary ideology favouring control, the EDHEC Leadership and Corporate Governance Research Centre looks into positive practices that help (re)legitimise management. To do so, we rely not only on the classic works on strategic leadership but also on recent research into the psychology of legitimacy and authority. Our goal: to define, document, and gauge managerial legitimacy, a key component of corporate performance but largely neglected by work on corporate governance.

So we work with managers and their teams to identify those practices that either strengthen or undermine the legitimacy required of successful leaders. It is qualitative research that draws on the daily experience of managers and looks at what it is possible to improve (practices, portrayals, structures) for better leadership of people and organisations. In the face of the managerial challenge posed by the ever-greater diversity of the people and demands involved, this work provides managers an opportunity to take stock of their ways of managing and to discover other leadership practices.

The EDHEC Leadership & Corporate Governance Research Centre sets itself apart from other centres for research on governance by looking first at its human and managerial dimensions: its ambition is to become the benchmark by which studies on the development of leadership teams and their managers and, more broadly, on overall stakeholder management, are measured.