Never let an academic crisis go to waste: Leadership studies in the wake of journal retractions (original) (raw)

Scholarly leadership of the study of leadership: A review of The Leadership Quarterly's second decade, 2000–2009

The Leadership Quarterly, 2010

In a reprise of Lowe and Gardner's (2000) review of The Leadership Quarterly's (LQ) first decade as a premier outlet for scholarly leadership research, we review 353 articles published in LQ during its second decade. Multiple methods were employed to prepare this review, including: interviews with the journal's current Senior Editor and Associate Editors; an assessment of LQ's impact, reputation, and most cited articles through citation analyses; a content analysis of article type (theory, empirical, and methods), contributors (e.g., discipline, nationality, and institutional affiliation), theoretical foundations, research strategies, sample location/type, data collection methods, and analytical procedures; survey and follow-up focus groups conducted with LQ Editorial Review Board members; and qualitative analyses to assess the prevalent themes, contributions, and trends reflected in LQ during its second decade. Drawing from these sources, we describe anticipated directions for future research.

Warning for excessive positivity: Authentic leadership and other traps in leadership studies

Leadership Quarterly, 2019

We study authentic leadership as a prominent but problematic example of positive leadership that we use as a more general “warning” against the current fashion of excessive positivity in leadership studies. Without trying to cover “everything”, we critically examine the principal tenets of mainstream authentic leadership theory and reveal a number of fundamental flaws: shaky philosophical and theoretical foundations, tautological reasoning, weak empirical studies, nonsensical measurement tools, unsupported knowledge claims and a generally simplistic and out of date view of corporate life. Even though our study focuses on authentic leadership, much of our criticism is also applicable to other popular positive leadership theories, such as transformational, servant, ethical and spiritual leadership.

The leadership trilogy: A review of the third decade of The Leadership Quarterly

The Leadership Quarterly, 2020

The present work complements and expands the first two reviews by documenting how the field has evolved with new characters, methodologies, and theories emerging while others decline and become less relevant. We extend the story of how LQ emerged from a start-up niche journal, evolved into the predominant outlet for leadership research and new theories, gained awareness of a growing need to reduce construct proliferation, and adopted increasingly sophisticated methodological techniques that call into question some of the field's prior research findings.

Thinking differently about leadership: A critical history of the form and formation of leadership studies

We have come to live in an age where leadership is the solution, regardless of the problem. Today, managers are called on to provide leadership which is ‘visionary’, ‘charismatic’, ‘transformational’ and ‘authentic’ in nature. This is what ‘followers’ are said to need to perform to their potential. The efforts of the academy in promoting these ideas means they are typically understood as modern, enlightened and grounded in scientific research. Taking a critical step back, this study examines why we have come to understand leadership in this way. Adopting a Foucauldian methodology, the study comprises three case studies which examine Classical Greek, 16th century European and modern scholarly discourses on leadership. The analysis foregrounds change and continuity in leadership thought and examines the underpinning assumptions, problematizations and processes of formation which gave rise to these truth claims. The relationship and subjectivity effects produced by these discourses alo...

Leadership: A Theoretical and Empirical Discourse

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INNOVATIVE RESEARCH AND KNOWLEDGE, 2018

Diverse views have emerged on leadership definitions, theories, and classification in academic discourse. The debate and conscious efforts made to clarify leadership actively has generated socio-cultural and organizational research on its styles and behaviours. This study seeks to identify the theoretical views of various academic scholars on some of the main theories that emerged during the 20 th century include: the Thomas Carlyle's Great Man theory, Gordon Allport's Trait theory, Fred Fiedler's Contingency theory, Hersey and Blanchard Situational Theory, Max Weber's Transactional theory, MacGregor Burns' Transformational theory, Robert Houses' Path-goal theory, and Vroom and Yetton's Participative theory. Empirical discourse that revealed findings of academic scholars have enshrined the import of leadership in organizations. Various academic literature that already have been subject to validity and reliability tests were reviewed and used to arrive at the findings. The study postulated the Mystical-man theory after a rich discourse and recommended it as the ideal theory for all Christian leaders to adopt as it is assumed to provide above average performance at all times, irrespective of followership behaviour.