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1. Introduction
Top managers play an important role in driving the behavior and performance of organizations (Hambrick, 2007). However, if responsibilities are not clearly defined among members of the top management team, conflicts are very likely, and they may have negative performance effects (Simons and Peterson, 2000). Such conflicts can also affect an organization’s capability to manage its cross-functional processes – business processes – whose design and operation is an important determinant of organizational performance (Kohlbacher and Reijers, 2013). When organizations decide to develop a business process management (BPM) capability, they often assign the BPM accountability to a specific member of the senior executive team. Some organizations assign this accountability to their chief operating officer (COO) or chief information officer (CIO), whereas others appoint a chief process officer (CPO) position (Lohmann and zur Muehlen, 2015). Such a constellation is intriguing because CPOs do not head a value-adding corporate function, whereas the CIO heads the IT function and the COO oversees an organization’s operations function. The literature suggests that the responsibilities of CPOs may be overlapping with those of other C-level executives (CXOs) (Robertson, 2013). Having the COO, CIO and CPO role assigned to different individuals may raise problems from an accountability perspective in case of conflicts and unsuccessful change. Anecdotal evidence shows that up to 70 percent of such change initiatives do not deliver benefits or fail (Beer and Nohria, 2000). Hence, an important question is whether CPOs add value to the top management team or whether they make process change even more complicated because of increased coordination effort. Further, a look into the literature revealed a lack of theory and joint understanding regarding the specific skills of CPOs compared to other C-level roles. While research provides insights into the roles and skills of C-level positions such as the COO, CIO and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), the CPO has not yet been investigated thoroughly (Bennett and Miles, 2006, Kappelman et al., 2016, Kaplan et al., 2012). To better understand the CPO role and the rationale of organizations to appoint this position, we conduct an explorative empirical study based on the career backgrounds and skill sets of individuals appointed as CPOs. Further, we compare the skill sets of CPOs with those of other C-level...