Spiritual Leadership Research: Past, Present and Future Using Bibliometric Analysis.

Abstract

Given a dearth of comprehensive assessments, this study provided a quantitative and scientific analysis of 286 articles on spiritual leadership (SL) published in Scopus-indexed journals. Citation, cluster and co-citation analysis were employed to highlight the key works, sketch the intellectual framework and identify the research gaps. The most influential documents, journals, authors/researchers, countries and universities were also determined using citation analysis. Besides author co-citation and journal co-citation, analysis were also performed to determine the intellectual structure of SL literature, followed by a thorough review of authors' keywords utilizing cluster analysis. Keyword co-occurrence cluster analysis led to the identification of five major clusters/streams: (a) spiritual leadership and well-being; (b) spiritual leadership and other types of leadership; (c) spiritual leadership and creativity; (d) spiritual leadership and employee-level outcomes; (e) spiritual leadership, sustainability and spirituality. Future research directions were suggested within each identified cluster. This study will assist regulators and academic scholars in understanding the nuts and bolts of spiritual leadership and identifying areas that require more research.