Unraveling the Definitions of Distributed Leadership: An Insight from the Industrial Sector through a Systematic Literature Review

Tonggo Marbun ()
Additional contact information
Tonggo Marbun: Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia

A chapter in Proceedings of the 9th Global Conference on Business, Management and Entrepreneurship (GCBME 2024), 2025, pp 743-749 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The shift in perspective that leadership cannot be performed by a single leader alone, but involves the active role of organizational members, makes Distributed Leadership (DL) an interesting leadership concept to understand more deeply today. However, research on distributed leadership is dominated by studies in the educational context, and there is no consensus on the definition of DL used. This study aims to understand the characteristics of studies and explore the definitions used in Distributed Leadership research using a Systematic Literature Review. The scientific articles in this SLR are 35 articles included in the Scopus database from 2018 to 2024. The review results revealed that the definition of DL is used based on the level of unit analysis. At the organizational level, the definition and concept used is Distributed Leadership, while at the individual level, the concept and definition used is Distributed Leadership Agency. Based on the analysis, the majority of DL studies included were published in 2020 and 2021 using quantitative methods. Conducted mostly in China, the research context is mostly in the Healthcare industry, and analysis was done at the organizational level. This research contributes by providing a definition of Distributed Leadership based on a summary of various definitions and characteristics of DL according to previous researchers. In addition, from the analysis of study characteristics in this research, it can be identified that there are research gaps that still need to be explored in future research in the context of non-education industries.

Keywords: Distributed Leadership; HRM; Leadership; Organizational; Systematic Literature Review (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:advbcp:978-94-6463-817-2_87

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789464638172

DOI: 10.2991/978-94-6463-817-2_87

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().