A Systematic Review of Self-leadership Related Research Trends in Korea －Focusing on Education Field

Abstract

According to the rapidly changing social structure and the characteristics of the times, the paradigm has changed from leadership to ‘self-leadership’. In existing organizations and teams, if leaders exert influence on team members to achieve organizational goals and improve performance, those members now have more opportunities to make decisions and to solve complex problems by themselves. Indeed, in recent years much attention has been paid to self-leadership. Not surprisingly then, there has been a good deal of domestic research on self-leadership, especially in the field of nursing. However, to date there is no research analyzing previous related research into the field of education. This study aims to analyze the research trends of self-leadership with a focus on domestic research in the education field, and to suggest implications for future research. For this purpose, 191 domestic research papers (academic articles published since 2005) were collected using the Academic Research Information Service and the National Assembly Library Search Service. All 191 research papers have been reviewed and classified according to analytical criteria, such as year of publication, research method, research field, research subjects and related variables. Our findings show that firstly, related research on self-leadership has been growing since 2005. Secondly, there was more research conducted using the quantitative method compared to research that made use of other research methods. Thirdly, concerning the subjects of study, university students were studied more than other groups of elementary, middle and high school students. Fourthly, regarding the analysis results on self-leadership related factors, 84.9% of the research involved diverse correlates. Based on these findings, it is necessary to continue studying self-leadership using various research methods, as well as to examine this research from diverse perspectives. Also, suggestions were made regarding self-leadership education designed within career education with a special focus on the various characteristics of the learners, along with lifelong education, in order to improve the self-leadership curriculum.