To maximize firm performance, it is important to have congruence between leadership style, organizational culture, and hiring criteria. By finding out the trends of congruence, company leaders will be able to adjust and choose their style of leadership, culture, and hiring. However, there is not much evidence from current research to support this. The hypothesis of this study is that there is congruence between leadership style, organizational culture, and hiring criteria. This study starts with the goal of finding trends among 70 companies. Adam Bryant’s the New York Times biweekly column “Corner Office” was used for the research. This was a qualitative study employing Glaser and Strauss’ grounded theory. Between leadership style and culture, two congruence relationships were found. The relationship between leadership style and hiring criteria had two statistically significant trends. There were five significant correlations between culture and hiring criteria. Seven out of nine correlations were congruent, and two of them were incongruent. The reasons for lack of further support for the hypothesis are secondary source bias, possibility for leaders’ dishonest answers, and vagueness of clarifying whether the leaders’ answers captured their companies’ culture and hiring criteria entirely.
