Linking Spiritual Leadership with Other Leadership Concepts: A Literature Review of Four Decades

Abstract

Recently, there is a growing interest in the concept of spiritual leadership. However, there are conceptual and research dilemmas regarding distinctions between the concept of spiritual leadership and other leadership approaches, especially positive leadership theories. Thus, there is a need to distinguish between the semantic relation construct of spiritual leadership and other related concepts in the field of management. Therefore, the current study provides a systematic literature review and bibliometric analyses of the 422 publications on spiritual leadership that were published between 1980 and 2021. The VOSviewer software with network visualization map was used. This paper contributes to understanding related aspects of spiritual leadership with other leadership approaches, provides a framework for integrating existing theories of leadership and leads to the identification of questions for future research. The study includes concepts based only on moral and ethical issues.