Studies that have examined organizations’ productivity and their leaders have found a rather weak relationship between a leader’s personal characteristics and organizational output. Similar empirical studies have also been conducted in relation to universities. These studies have concentrated on university leaders’ individual academic performance as a quantifiable individual characteristic. They have yielded rather contradictory results. In this study, I take a theoretical approach to quantify the effects of top leadership on university research performance. I assume that top leaders may influence university research productivity, but this influence should be visible. I theorize two types of university leader: the “strategic manager” who seeks to reallocate resources to make it of use for the whole university and the “politician” who reallocates resources to benefit certain research areas, especially the one they specialize in. It is hypothesized that (1) if a leader is a strategic manager, an increase in overall university research productivity would be observed; and (2) if a leader is a politician, there will be an increase in university performance in the research field in which the leader specializes. Using an extensive sample of Russian universities, it is demonstrated that while there is no observable relationship between overall university research productivity and the university leader’s academic excellence, there is a positive influence by university leader’s academic productivity on the research performance of his/her specific research field. This study finds evidence that leaders qua “politicians” can have a profound effect on their respective research areas’ productivity.

对组织生产力及其领导者的研究发现，领导者的个人特征与组织产出之间的关系相当薄弱。类似的实证研究也与大学有关。这些研究集中在大学领导者的个人学业成绩作为可量化的个人特征。他们得出了相当矛盾的结果。在这项研究中，我采用理论方法来量化高层领导对大学研究绩效的影响。我认为最高领导人可能会影响大学的研究生产力，但这种影响应该是可见的。我理论化了两种类型的大学领导：寻求重新分配资源以使其为整个大学所用的“战略管理者”和重新分配资源以使某些研究领域受益的“政治家”，尤其是他们所专注的研究领域。 假设（1）如果领导者是一名战略经理，将观察到整体大学研究生产力的提高；（2）如果领导者是政治家，那么在领导者专攻的研究领域的大学表现会有所提高。使用大量俄罗斯大学样本表明，虽然大学整体研究生产力与大学领导者的学术成就之间没有可观察到的关系，但大学领导者的学术生产力对其特定研究的研究绩效有积极影响场地。