The status and future trends of Chinese leadership research: a bibliometric approach

Abstract

Purpose

China after 1949, especially since entering the 21st century, significant progress has been made in leadership research under Chinese context. However, so far there has been no systematic review and prospect of China's leadership research in the past 70 years. Therefore, with the help of scientific visualization software Citespace, this paper analyzes the research papers on leadership in the context of China from the top international journals of management science and applied psychology (1949–2018), supplemented and verified the previous research conclusions based on qualitative review, and quantitatively demonstrated the research evolution of leadership field.

Design Methodology Approach

Using a scientific visualization tool CiteSpace and 145 international leadership works, which were published in 64 top international journals and collected from the Web of Science database, and 852 domestic works which were published in 28 top domestic journals and collected from the CNKI database from 1949 to 2018, we draws keyword co-occurrence knowledge graph and keyword strategy map to visualize the landscape and evolution of leadership research and analyze the hot topics and research trends in the field of leadership.

Findings

The research found that: (1) Before 2002, there were only 7 articles published in 64 international top journal, mainly focusing on Western leadership theories such as transformational, cross-cultural comparison and the adaptability in Chinese context; (2) From 2003 to 2012, scholars had begun to introduce mainstream quantitative research paradigm in international academic community; (3) From 2013 to 2018, researches tended to be synchronized, with 461 and 99 papers published respectively. How emerging leaderships (such as ethical leadership) affect on various emerging outcome variables (such as creativity, voice behavior, unethical pro-organizational behavior etc.) is hot topic for future research.

Originality Value

Different from the previous qualitative reviews on organizational culture research, this paper, for the first time, uses bibliometric research methods to systematically analyze the evolution path of leadership research during the 70 years of China(1949–2018, and puts forward the future research prospects.

Citation

Yang, M., Chen, W., Zhou, Q., Yang, B. and Xu, C. (2022), "The status and future trends of Chinese leadership research: a bibliometric approach", Nankai Business Review International, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 1-33. https://doi.org/10.1108/NBRI-03-2021-0016