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2019-0997 IJOI
http://www.ijoi-online.org/
THE EVOLUTION OF THE LEADERSHIP THEORIES AND THE
ANALYSIS OF NEW RESEARCH TRENDS
Yuan-Duen Lee*
Professor, The Department Of International Business,
College Of Management, Chang Jung Christian University, Taiwan
Pi-Ching Chen
Professor, The Department Of International Business,
College Of Management, Chang Jung Christian University, Taiwan
Chin-Lai Su
Ph.D. Student, Doctoral Program Of Business And Operations Management,
College Of Management, Chang Jung Christian University, Taiwan
*Corresponding Author: ydlee@mail.cjcu.edu.tw
Abstract
This study examines the status of contemporary leadership research over the last dec-
ade. With SSCI citation data from the top leadership journal: The Leadership Quar-
terly, including 696 journal articles and 63,407 cited references, we conducted a co-
citation analysis to explore the intellectual structure of leadership studies. The results
show that contemporary leadership studies focus on transformational leadership,
LMX theory, implicit leadership theories, authentic leadership, charismatic leadership,
ethical leadership, and leadership affect and emotions. This study thus identifies the
knowledge essentials of leadership research and profiles the most influential journals,
publications and scholars and their relationships in this field. The results of this study
also provide a useful tool for researchers to access the literature of leadership re-
search.
Keywords: Leadership theory, Intellectual structure, Knowledge network, Co-citation
analysis
Introduction on the influence process between
leader and employees (Bass, 1990;
As the field of leadership is very Rost, 1991; Yukl, 2006). The past dec-
broad and fragmented, leadership re- ade has seen a growth in research on
search remains predominantly focused the field of leadership, and thus pro-
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duced an impressive array of leader- lications as references. The cited pub-
ship-related studies. The objective of lications in these papers include both
this study is therefore to provide lead- books and published journal articles.
ership researchers with an overview of
contemporary leadership-related pub- The author co-citation analysis
lications in the last decade, and to map (ACA) method is commonly used to
the intellectual structure of different group authors of reference papers.
research topics and relationships in the Since the traditional ACA method
development of this field. This study analyzes only the first authors of ref-
also attempts to help identify the link- erence papers, it disregards the contri-
ages among different publications and butions of the coauthors and can only
confirm their status and positions with group each first author into one cluster.
regard to their contributions to the de- In contrast, this study uses an article
velopment of leadership. The principal co-citation analysis method, which
methods used are citation and co- cita- groups complete author sets of refer-
tion analysis, social network analysis, ence papers into clusters, and thus
plus a factor analysis which is per- finds authors who may have expertise
formed to identify the invisible net- in more than one area. Based on the
work of knowledge generation under- article co-citation analysis of these data
lying the leadership literature. in leadership, this study first reports
the relative academic importance of
The Social Sciences Citation In- journals and articles (in terms of num-
dex (SSCI) is used for the analysis. ber of citations) in the leadership lit-
This is a widely used database, which erature, and then points out the his-
includes citations published in over torical stages in the development of the
3,000 of the world's leading scholarly field. This study further maps the
social sciences journals, covering more co-citation networks and reveals the
than 55 disciplines. The SSCI thus top 50 articles in the past 10 years, and
provides the most comprehensive and predicts the future directions of this
widely accepted database of leadership field.
publications. Among the journals in-
cluded in the SSCI, the Leadership Review of the Academic Literature on
Quarterly is arguably the most influen- Bibliometric Studies
tial one publishing leadership-related
papers, and so is used as the core In bibliometric studies, mathe-
source for analysis. The advantage of matical and statistical techniques are
using journals instead of keywords to applied to the analysis of large vol-
generate the needed citation data is the umes of documentation (Diodato,
“guaranteed quality” of their published 1994). These studies are usually per-
papers, and their clear boundaries with formed to reconstruct the history of
regard to the acceptable methods and various sciences and to question tradi-
topics as defined by their specific edi- tional dogmas, and their results allow
torial policies. This study thus included researchers of the focal discipline to
all the papers published in leadership correct any errors of perception that
from 2008 to 2017. The results in- may have arisen (Mariluz & Antonio,
cluded 696 journal articles in total, 2009). Within the field of the sociology
which further cited 63,407 other pub- of science, bibliometric studies provide
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The International Journal of Organizational Innovation
Volume 12 Number 3, January 2020
2019-0997 IJOI
http://www.ijoi-online.org/
valuable data on scientific communica- search. As a result, heavily cited arti-
tion. The study of references can high- cles are likely to have exerted a greater
light whether a discipline has an in- influence on the subject than those less
ward- or outward-looking approach frequently cited (Culnan, 1986, 1987;
(from both the thematic and geo- Sharplin & Mabry, 1985; Tahai &
graphic perspectives); the circulation Meyer, 1999). Similarly, co-citation
of new ideas; and the existence of bar- analysis of documents records the
riers between the applied and basic number of papers that have cited any
sciences, and between specialists and particular pair of documents, and is
the scientific communities to which interpreted as a measure of the similar-
they belong (Ferreiro, 1993; Mariluz & ity of the content of the two documents
Antonio, 2009). (Ramos-Rodriguez & Ruiz-Navarro,
2004). As such, bibliometrics can be
The quantitative analysis of lit- said to give “the field’s view of itself”
erature is called bibliometrics, and this (White & Griffith, 1981).
can provide more objective views by
examining citations, co-citations, or a Many scholars have begun to use
combination of the two. Among the citation and co-citation analysis to
various methods developed in the last examine the knowledge network of
three decades, citation analysis is the various management literatures. For
earliest and the most widely used ap- example, Ponzi (2002) mapped the in-
proach that can be used to quantify this tellectual structure and interdiscipli-
process. Merton (1979) claimed: “Ci- nary breadth of knowledge manage-
tation indexing has been a standard of ment in its early stage of development,
scientific bibliography for more than a using principle component analysis on
decade but its sociological and histori- a co-citation matrix. Ramos-Rodriguez
cal research potentials have not yet and Ruiz-Navarro (2004) examined the
been fully realized.” Within all aca- intellectual structure of strategic man-
demic disciplines, researchers typically agement research with a similar analy-
cluster into informal networks that fo- sis on papers published in the Strategic
cus on common questions in common Management Journal. Acedo and
ways (Price, 1963), and within these Casillas (2005) explored the research
networks one scholar’s concepts and paradigms of international manage-
results may be picked up by another, to ment research with an author co- cita-
be extended, tested, and refined. tion. More recently, Nerur, Rasheed
and Natarajan (2008) examined the
Therefore, the history of the ex- intellectual structure of strategic man-
changes among members of these agement field by applying factor
networks, as revealed in patterns of analysis, multidimensional scaling, and
citations, describes the intellectual co-citation analysis, Ma, Wang and
structure of a field. When one scholar Lee (2012) examined the dynamic
cites the prior work of another, citation change in the research paradigms of
analysis provides a means of docu- ethnic entrepreneurship studies, and
menting this process. Citation analysis Wang, Lee and Lee (2013) examined
is based on the premise that authors the intellectual structure of expatriate
cite papers they consider to be impor- field by applying social network analy-
tant to the development of their re- sis, factor analysis, and co-citation
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The International Journal of Organizational Innovation
Volume 12 Number 3, January 2020
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analysis. The current study will follow tation analysis is based on the distribu-
this line of research to examine the in- tion frequencies obtained from the ci-
tellectual structure of contemporary tation count, and this is obtained by
leadership research and to map its in- examining all the possible pairs from
visible knowledge network and key the 50 most frequently cited articles
research clusters in the past ten years and counting all the articles that cite
in order to provide a broader picture of both of these (see Figure 2). The top
contemporary leadership studies. articles were identified on the basis of
the total number of citations in the se-
Research Methodology lected articles, and then a co-citation
matrix was developed before a picto-
In order to provide an overview of rial map was drawn to describe the
contemporary leadership research, this correlations among different articles
study explored the intellectual struc- (see Table 1). In the final stage, article
ture of leadership between 2008 and co-citation analysis was conducted to
2017. Citation and co-citation analysis carry out social network analysis and
were the main methods used for this. factor analysis in order to map the in-
With citation and co- citation analysis, tellectual structure of leadership stud-
this research proceeded in four stages, ies and to explore the invisible knowl-
each of which required different ap- edge nodes that have contributed most
proaches to examining the evolution of to such studies and their possible evo-
leadership studies (see Figure 1). lutionary patterns.
In the first stage, databases were Results and Discussions
identified as the sources of leadership
publications. Then data collection and Citation Analysis
analysis techniques were designed to
collect the desired information about Data mapping was conducted and
the topics, authors, and journals on an intellectual structure of leadership
leadership research. In the second research was revealed by using article
stage, citation analysis was tabulated co-citation analysis. To identify the key
for each of the 63,407 source docu- publications and scholars that have laid
ments using the MS Excel software. down the groundwork of leadership
After a series of operations, key nodes research, citation data were tabulated
in the knowledge network in leadership for each of the 63,407 source docu-
studies were identified and the struc- ments using Excel. The citation analy-
tures developed. sis produced some interesting back-
ground statistics, as shown in the fol-
The third stage was to perform an lowing tables. Tables 2 lists the most
article co-citation analysis based on the cited journals in leadership studies in
most cited article of each sub-period, the last decade, among which The
to trace the relationships among them Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Ap-
and identify schools of thought and plied Psychology, Academy of Man-
key topics of research. The results of agement Journal, Journal of Personal-
the article co-citation analysis were ity and Social Psychology, and Acad-
also tabulated for each of the source emy of Management Review are the
documents using Excel. Article co- ci- top five, followed by Journal of
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The International Journal of Organizational Innovation
Volume 12 Number 3, January 2020
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