"Hood was the army commander who planned and ordered offensive assaults whereas Kearny was a division commander who was acting under orders devised by superior officers. Moreover, as a division commander, Kearny led his troops from the front, thereby exposing himself to greater danger."
The thing is, a division commander is
also meant to be a manager - Kearny in 1862 was commanding nearly as many men as some corps commanders at Gettysburg, for example - and Kearny often seemed incapable of actually acting as a division commander.
The way that command works is that it's a hierarchical organization. Once you get beyond a certain point then a commander has less and less place leading from the front, and a division in early 1862, being an organization of close to 10,000 PFD, has gone well past that point.
In other words, there are other men who can lead from the front (such as, say, the regimental colonels and the brigade commanders) but there's nobody else who can coordinate the division; Heintzelman says as such about Seven Pines when he says that Kearny "forgets he is a general". (Heintzelman had to take over Kearny's division directly because Kearny was not commanding it.)
Indeed, look at Kearny's death - he was killed trying to get the 21st Mass to advance, and the 21st Massachusetts was in Ferrero's brigade of Reno's division; Reno was also the corps commander of the 9th Corps, but Kearny was part of the
third Corps.
(His division was a 16 regiment organization, and Reno's entire corps only had 12 regiments in it in the campaign so it was probably easier for one general to control than Kearny's division...)