Visioning to transform: a systematic review of leader vision research from a motivational perspective

Vision is a powerful tool for motivating employees to achieve collective goals with a compelling image of a desirable future. It has been extensively studied from diverse perspectives, including leadership, organizational vision, and vision communication. While extant research offers valuable insights into different aspects of leader vision, findings remain fragmented, necessitating effective synthesis. In leadership research, vision is often embedded within broader theories that incorporate additional components (e.g. charismatic leadership and transformational leadership). Meanwhile, the organizational vision and vision communication literature provides a multitude of definitions and foci on vision formation and delivery characteristics, leaving how vision is accepted and drives motivation understudied. Based on a systematic review of 417 literature sources, we developed an integrative model of leader vision, proposed its comprehensive definition, and identified central elements of a strong vision. We introduce three motivational properties of leader vision – transcendence (elevating employees to higher-level meanings and values), efficacy (enhancing employees’ subjective and objective performance capacity), and collectivity (strengthening interpersonal relationships within the collective) – that serve as a bridge across the diverse perspectives adopted in prior studies. Furthermore, we provide testable propositions of the proposed integrative model of leader vision to enlighten future research.