A Social Network Perspective of Leadership Research between 1990 and 2017

Guided by social network theory, we examined a rich database of 520,925 citations on 2,280 leadership articles published in 11 academic journals from 1990 to 2017. We find that leadership scholars’ network centralities (betweenness centrality and degree centrality) are related to their research impact, which is measured by the number of Google Scholar citations received, after being normalized by the age of publication and then weighted by the order of authorship. We draw the topology of popular research topics and the collaboration network of most prominent leadership scholars and institutions. We analyze the trend of the authors’ productivity and influence over time, and we identify the trend of research topics. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.