Chapter 2: Literature Review of Leadership Theories

Leadership theories occupying the centre-stage debate among researchers were identified in order to arrive at theories to be considered for this study. For this, the authors studied prominent leadership handbooks, popular leadership textbooks and leading leadership journals such as Leadership Quarterly and reviewed based on the search word ‘leadership theory’. Only such theories referred to across all mentioned literature sources were considered for inclusion in the study. The sources of handbook were Bass and Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership (Bass & Stogdill, 1990), The Bass Handbook of Leadership (Bass, 2008), The Oxford Handbook of Leadership (Rumsey, 2012) and Sage Handbook of Leadership (Bryman, Collinson, Grint, Jackson, & Uhl-Bien, 2011). The authors also considered two textbooks titled Leadership Theory and Practice by Northouse (2016) and Leadership in Organizations by Yukl (2013) for identifying leadership theories. Finally, the authors also considered an extensive literature review by Dinh et al. (2014), titled ‘Leadership theory and research in the new millennium: Current theoretical trends and changing perspectives’ and other leadership articles from top six leadership journals such as Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Leadership Studies, Strategy and Leadership, Journal of Strategy and Leadership, Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies and Leadership and Organization Development Journal. The next section discusses the development of leadership theories over the years.