A Literature Review into Leadership Styles Discussed in the Past Five Years

Anne Kleefstra

doi:10.4236/jss.2019.76015

Abstract

Leadership is one of the most discussed topics in literature across all different industries and sciences. There is a need for clarification and overview on the different types of leadership discussed in literature. This explorative research describes a systematic literature review to give a general overview of the types of leadership discussed in the literature in the time period between March 2013 and March 2018. In total 658 different types of leadership were mentioned in 380 analyzed articles. Of that transformational leadership was mentioned 200 times, effective leadership was mentioned 118 times, transactional leadership 110 times, participative leadership was mentioned 89 times and ethical leadership was mentioned 72 times. Often these types of leadership were also mentioned together and a great overlap on the different leadership styles was mentioned. Further research on leadership should therefore focus less on explorative research and more on developmental research of a new full range scientific leadership model including the different leadership styles discussed most often in the past five year.

Highlights

Suddaby [1] wrote about the need for more construct clarity in management research and the need to “create precise and parsimonious categorical distinctions between concepts” and to “show their semantic relationship to other related constructs” ([1], p. 347)
There is a need for clarification and overview on the different types of leadership discussed in literature
This explorative research describes a systematic literature review to give a general overview of the types of leadership discussed in the literature in the time period between March 2013 and March 2018

Summary

Introduction

Suddaby [1] wrote about the need for more construct clarity in management research and the need to “create precise and parsimonious categorical distinctions between concepts” and to “show their semantic relationship to other related constructs” ([1], p. 347). Nowhere is this need more apparent than in the enormous amount of literature on leadership styles [2]. Leadership is one of the most discussed topics in literature across all different industries and sciences. Three theories of leadership are discussed most in literature. The most discussed model of leadership is the theory of Bass [3] who describes transformational, transactional and laissez-faire leadership in a model. Transforming and transactional leadership were first discussed by Burns [4] and a few years later Bass [3] extended the theory of Burns [4]. Bass [3] introduced the term transformational leadership and combined this leadership style with transactional leadership and laissez-faire leadership

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