Leadership in project management: a scoping review

Abstract

This scoping review article is a systematic literature review focusing on 'leadership in project management' with the aim of enabling future researchers to achieve a better understanding of main foci and topics of state-of-the-art studies, areas requiring further research, and/or limitations and blank or less studied subjects. To do so, we employed the five-step scoping review method (Arksey and O'Malley, 2005) in scanning and analysing pertinent articles from electronic databases. As described in the Section 2, of 1,120 citations, 56 articles matched the inclusion criteria. For each article, the key variables including main foci, research methodology, limitations, suggestions, implications, validity, reliability, conclusions, etc., were extracted in order to answer the research questions, with quantitative analysis for each variable included in the results section and a brief qualitative analysis of the results in the discussion. Finally, future research suggestions and research gaps are carefully delineated as well as a summary of our key findings.