A Text Mining-Based Review of Literature on Collective Forms of Leadership

Abstract

Collectivistic leadership approaches have become important to derive a new leadership approach by involving multiple individuals in the leadership process. This paper uses an advanced text mining technique to conduct a comprehensive analysis of 1,353 articles published in various academic disciplines on the diverse subject of collectivistic approaches to leadership. In Study 1, we analyzed seven most frequently used labels of collectivistic leadership (i.e., team leadership, shared leadership, distributed leadership, collaborative leadership, collective leadership, complexity leadership, relational leadership) by extracting frequently occurring terms and their correlation through text mining. The results show that the different leadership labels in the extant literature share similar keywords. In Study 2, we identified latent topics on the collectivistic leadership literature by conducting correlated topic modeling. As a result, we found the most prominent topics discussed on the subject, such as “Network and relations”, “Education and school”, “Team and performance”, “Non-quantitative design and setting”, “Collaboration in healthcare”, “Innovation and complexity” and “Organizational learning”.