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Abstract
This study examines the status of contemporary leadership research over the last decade. With SSCI citation data from the top leadership journal: The Leadership Quarterly, including 696 journal articles and 63,407 cited references, we conducted a cocitation analysis to explore the intellectual structure of leadership studies. The results show that contemporary leadership studies focus on transformational leadership, LMX theory, implicit leadership theories, authentic leadership, charismatic leadership, ethical leadership, and leadership affect and emotions. This study thus identifies the knowledge essentials of leadership research and profiles the most influential journals, publications and scholars and their relationships in this field. The results of this study also provide a useful tool for researchers to access the literature of leadership research.
Keywords: Leadership theory, Intellectual structure, Knowledge network, Co-citation analysis
Introduction
As the field of leadership is very broad and fragmented, leadership research remains predominantly focused on the influence process between leader and employees (Bass, 1990; Rost, 1991; Yukl, 2006). The past dec ade has seen a growth in research on the field of leadership, and thus pro- duced an impressive array of leadership-related studies. The objective of this study is therefore to provide leadership researchers with an overview of contemporary leadership-related publications in the last decade, and to map the intellectual structure of different research topics and relationships in the development of this field. This study also attempts to help identify the linkages among different publications and confirm their status and positions with regard to their contributions to the development of leadership. The principal methods used are citation and co- citation analysis, social network analysis, plus a factor analysis which is performed to identify the invisible network of knowledge generation underlying the leadership literature.
The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is used for the analysis. This is a widely used database, which includes citations published in over 3,000 of the world's leading scholarly social sciences journals, covering more than 55 disciplines. The SSCI thus provides the most comprehensive and widely accepted database of leadership publications. Among the journals included in the SSCI, the Leadership Quarterly is arguably the most influential one publishing leadership-related papers, and so is used as the core source for analysis. The advantage of using journals instead of keywords to generate the needed...