The number of academic studies, news articles, white papers, and books on IT strategic leadership has been growing for several years. The insight produced from the academic side highlights the positive role of senior IT executives (sITes) on various issues such as innovative and effective use of IT in the firm (Armstrong and Sambamurthy 1998; Leidner et al. 2010; Li et al. 2006), development of core IT capabilities (Feeny and Willcocks 1998), alignment between IT and business strategy (Chan et al. 2006), and firm's ability to sustain its IT enabled competitive advantage (Dehning and Stratopoulos 2003). The success stories of sITes such as R. Mott at Wal-Mart, D. Busch at Intel, T. Shack at PNC, and T. Stanley at Harrah's provide the anecdotal evidence to back these insights. Still this proliferation of academic and professional evidence has produced little insight on how to motivate sITes to make a significant and sustainable contribution to their firm's quest for competitive advantage. The main objective of this study is to propose and test a pattern of positive reciprocity between sITes and firms with superior dynamic IT capability. More specifically we propose and test the following question: Are firms who reward their sITes for their contribution to their firm's ability to develop superior IT capability more likely to sustain their superiority?
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