Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to reveal the mediating role of leadership style on the relationship between strategy and company performance.Design/methodology/approach: The study uses empirical data gathered from top managers in a stratified sample of 476 Danish private businesses.Findings: The results show the mediating effects of leadership styles on strategic performance. In particular, both supportive and directive leadership styles partially mediate the effect of the differentiation strategy, while the supportive leadership style displays a stronger mediating effect than the directive one. The multi-group analysis shows the moderating impact of the manager’s tenure, managerial level, strategy clarity, industry and business environment risk.Research limitations/implications: The study is limited by its nature and the specificity of the national context in which it was conducted. In this vein, the evidence collected here can be enlarged and complemented by having access to panel data or the generalization of some results to neighboring or other developed countries.Practical implications: Several implications of the findings for managerial practices are discussed.Originality/value: There are very few discussions of the mediating effect of leadership style between strategy and performance. The paper fills the gap by examining the role of leadership style planning on the relationship between those two variables in Denmark.

The evaluation of employee performance is one of the most controversial practices in today organizations. We build on sociological and economic arguments to propose that this controversy is mainly due to the trade-off that the formalization of performance evaluations imposes in meritocratic organizations. We empirically investigate this trade-off by looking at the relationship between formal employee evaluations and meritocratic human resource practices. Using a Danish national representative sample with matched employer-employee data, we find that organizations that use more meritocratic pay and promotion policies are more likely to have formalized their performance evaluation processes. In addition, formal evaluations are associated with better organizational performance, but less so in more uncertain environments and in firms with less prevalence of jobs with managerial content.