An Ontology Engineering Perspective to Create a Unifying Conceptualization of the Leadership Domain

This article aims to propose a unifying conceptualization for the leadership domain utilizing ontology engineering to address conceptual ambiguity and information overlap. The approach involves identifying and defining structural, common, and underlying elements to organize leadership information. The methodology is based on a literature review guided by principles of ontology engineering. It focuses on collecting, analyzing, disambiguating, and synthesizing information to represent general elements in the leadership domain as categories, subcategories, and instances, including their relationships. The result is a unifying conceptualization comprising defined categories, subcategories, general instances, and relationships. This structure creates a taxonomic framework to organize the leadership’s domain information, classifying approaches, theories, models, styles, variables, characteristics, and organizational results. Expert validation confirms their suitability to represent the leadership domain in a general manner. Researchers can use it to understand and compare information, identify conceptual similarities and differences, and support knowledge dissemination within the leadership domain, reducing ambiguity and overlap.