Title: Leadership in crisis periods: a bibliometric analysis and future research agenda

Authors: Md Asadul Islam

Addresses: Sunway Business School, Sunway University, Jalan Universiti, Bandar Sunway, Selangor, 47500, Malaysia

Abstract: Business organisations are facing frequent crises in recent years; therefore, the managers have to adopt and apply different leadership styles to cope with the crises. There are few studies that provide a holistic overview of leadership in crisis periods. To fill this gap, a comprehensive analysis of 621 Scopus-indexed publications relating to leadership in crisis periods from 1992 to 2024 was conducted. Seven distinct themes emerged based on the keywords of the clusters that include digital leadership and performance during crisis, servant leadership during crisis, crisis leadership for resilience, transactional, transformational and virtual leadership, building trust in leadership through communication and ethics, ethical leadership and organisational outcomes and political leadership and crisis communication for resilience. The study contributes to the existing knowledge by providing an up-to-date overview of leadership in crisis research and showing potential areas for future research.

Keywords: leadership; crisis periods; bibliometric analysis; co-occurrence analysis; Scopus database.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMP.2025.148349

International Journal of Management Practice, 2025 Vol.18 No.5, pp.548 - 564

Received: 13 Oct 2024
Accepted: 22 Dec 2024
Published online: 02 Sep 2025 *

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