Abstract
This review examines the current approaches to leadership by dividing them into two major categories: those that treat leadership as a hierarchical system and those that treat leadership as a complex, flexible framework. The innovation of the paper is in using a bibliometric analysis in order to observe whether our results bore a resemblance to what is known in the literature about the different approaches to leadership until now. The data sources for the analyses were the Science and Social Science Citation Index Expanded database and the World Catalog database. The main argument is that although transformational leadership still remains the most influential in this field of research, shared, complexity, and collective types of leadership are the approaches that show the next greatest intensity of research. A quantitate analysis of a bibliometric method supports this suggestion. We argue that the reason for their popularity in the field lies in the modern structure of Western society, with its shift from the Industrial Era to the Knowledge Era shaped by democratization, globalization, and growing complexity of modern society.
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Tal, D., Gordon, A. Leadership of the present, current theories of multiple involvements: a bibliometric analysis. Scientometrics 107, 259–269 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1880-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1880-y