Visualising the quality and the evolution of transactional and transformation leadership research: a 16-year bibliometric review

Abstract

Adding more scope and breadth to the reviews on leadership literature, this paper aims at developing a bibliometric study on 1059 articles that covered transactional and transformational leadership styles research and are published in the Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus platforms from 2004 to 2019. This bibliometric review implies providing a map of this field using VOSViewer visualisation of co-citation, co-occurrence and co-authorship, and descriptive analysis to show the quality of the publications. The aim of this review is to determine the evolution of research, where this topic raises a greater interest, among which academics, countries and journals, the most relevant affiliations and their collaborations and to identify the research with greater impact, developing several citation analyses. This study draws conclusions and up-to-date insights to provide readers with a preview on the development of transactional and transformational leadership research, along with those who contributed the most to this development and advice for future research.

Keywords:

• Transactional and transformational leadership style
• bibliometric research
• co-citation
• co-occurrence
• co-authorship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).