The dual challenge of contextualization in leadership research: A systematic review, critical assessment and future research agenda

Although context is widely seen as essential for leadership research, the field is thought to suffer from a context deficit. Building on Johns (2006) and Rousseau and Fried (2001), this systematic review investigates whether empirical leadership studies go beyond merely acknowledging context and engage in contextualization by truly embedding context in the research design, analysis, and interpretation. We argue that contextualization is best assessed as a research practice in its own right. Yet, the value of contextual findings also depends on how a study handles two further challenges in leadership research: conceptual proliferation and causal ambiguity. We systematically review 209 empirical leadership studies (2003−2023), coding them not only on a large set of context variables, but crucially also on the degree of contextualization, and as complementary diagnostics, on conceptual clarity and causal inference. Our review shows that many leadership studies do typically incorporate context, but the degree to which they engage in high levels of contextualization remains limited. In addition, and irrespective of the degree of contextualization, the review brings to the fore that the analysis of the leadership concepts used or of causal inference in our sample of 209 papers is underdeveloped. The dual challenge that emerges from our review for leadership scholars is therefore not only to deepen contextualization as such, but to do so while also strengthening leadership conceptualization and causal inference.