Servant leadership knowledge structures: A bibliometric review

Abstract

Servant leadership is an emerging approach that appears timely debate for scientific progress in leadership research. There have been several qualitative, quantitative, and systematic reviews on servant leadership. Surprisingly, there needs to be more research using bibliometric analysis on servant leadership. For this reason, this study addresses methodological limitations by using a bibliometric review to analyze and visualize the historical background of servant leadership, its present state of knowledge structures and emerging trends. To do so, we included a sample of 214 peer-reviewed articles over the period 2004 to 2022 by using the Web of Science (WoS) database. The bibliometric analysis revealed three major clusters in servant leadership: (1) Servant leadership and innovativeness, (2) Servant leadership with employees' extra-role behaviours and personality traits, (3) Attitudinal and behavioural employee outcomes such as emotional labour and ethical followers. Significantly, our contribution recognizes more nuanced results than previously partially identified and highlights servant leadership research. This study also opens a fresh avenue for future scholars by providing future research questions.