Joseph Martelli, D.I.T., associate professor of business, and Patricia Abels, D.B.A., assistant professor of business, review research they are conducting on leaders of Fortune 500 companies. Photo by Anne Risser Lee

What does it take to be the leader of a Fortune 500 company? Joseph Martelli, D.I.T., associate professor of business and Patricia Abels, D.B.A., assistant professor of business, are conducting research that may answer that question.
   
Using the 2008 Fortune 500 company list, Martelli and Abels have gathered data on each company and its CEO. Basic information gathered includes ethnicity, gender, age, where each leader received his or her education and what each leader studied.
   
“We want to push the current state of knowledge further and profile the leadership of corporate America,” explained Martelli.
   
Martelli and Abels started the project by developing a comprehensive research study code book – the first step in organizing the more than 40 variables used in the study, which translates to roughly 23,000 data points for analysis.

There are codes for each company headquarters’ geographic location according to the census bureau classification system, codes for each company’s North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) number, codes to differentiate whether the CEO attended a public or private college, codes to indicate the CEO’s area of study and codes that indicate whether the CEO’s college was an Ivy League or a Big Ten school, among others.
   
To make data entry more efficient on such a large data set, the University’s Teaching and Learning Technology Center (TLTC) purchased and installed a data entry module within the SPSS predictive analytics software, which is available for use to the University community.
   
Martelli and Abels will use the data to conduct extensive cross-tab analysis. They will look at how CEOs differ from industry to industry, how many CEOs received a liberal arts education compared to those who received a business education and if CEOs from the same industry have similar characteristics, among many other comparisons.
   
“Leadership is a critical variable in institutional success,” said Martelli. “I hope that we can address the leadership gap in America.”
   
Martelli and Abels plan to present their research beginning this spring.