Towards Conceptualising Strategic Leadership Phenomenon: A Systematic Review and Call for Future Research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper responds to concerns in the literature characterised by declining interest in the focus on strategic leadership in the last couple of years, alongside other indications pointing to a construct still in an exploratory state despite its growing scholarly and practical significance. The study was undertaken as a conceptual paper that adopted a systematic literature review methodology to address three concerns that touched on establishing the current conceptualisation of strategic leadership in literature, the phenomenon emerging from its operation and the implications it raises for future scholarship. The authors sampled 218 peer-reviewed articles published in refereed journals between the years 2000-2024. The findings of the paper report on the scholarly milestones achieved in the seven phases of the historical development of strategic leadership, areas of convergence and divergence found across the diversity of definitions from various authors, the lenses through which proponents have described its nature, the variety of dimensions, as well as theories that underpin its conceptualisation and phenomenon. Various constructs associated with the emerging phenomenon have been reported, and the set of conceptual, empirical and contextual gaps in knowledge has been pointed out. The paper proposes a multidisciplinary-based theoretical framework for advancing knowledge in strategic leadership in diverse contexts. The study calls on future research to consider adopting the proposed model in guiding empirical investigations into the behaviour of strategic leadership in contexts least studied and the adoption of more rigorous methodological and statistical techniques.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.117 | 0.228 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.029 | 0.031 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".