International Journal of Organizational Leadership

Abstract

This study examines the various features of existing servant leadership research by retrieving and analyzing the publications within the social sciences field. The main objective of this study is to review the last 50 years of servant leadership research in the field of social science starting from 1970s till end of 2019. The bibliometric analysis such as bibliographic coupling, co-authorship and co-occurrence analysis was conducted. The study result shows the most researched concept, key authors, sources/journals, institutions, countries and publication within the servant leadership field. This study also highlights the collaborative research networks of servant leadership research existing between the authors across the globe. This study is the first effort to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric review on academic servant leadership literature and also it is the first attempt to map an orderly conceptual structure by applying visualization bibliometric techniques. The major contributions of this study are the results from examining the literature in a structured, comprehensive and objective manner. These results offer the researchers and scholars a guidance to further explore the servant leadership research area in the field of social sciences. This study also provides the researchers to build networks with multiple institutions, countries and authors across the globe that have contributed significantly in this field