Public Leadership: A review of the literature and framework for future research

This study analyses and reviews the literature on public leadership with a novel combination of bibliometric methods. We detect four generic approaches to public leadership (i.e. a functionalist, a behavioural, a biographical and a reformist approach) which differ with regard to their philosophy of science (i.e. objective vs subjective) and level of analysis (i.e. micro-level vs multi-level). From our findings, we derive four directions for future research which involve shifting the focus from the aspect of ‘leadership’ to the element of ‘public’, from simplicity to complexity, from universalism to cultural relativism and from public leadership to public followership.