Resumo

Leadership has been approached as essential for the survival and growth of organizations, considering that it affects business results and, also, because it is considered a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. The organizations then elected leaders as central to the role of reducing uncertainty and promoting effectiveness. It is also worth noting that the field of organizational behavior has evolved in studies that address this theme, but that there are still territories to be covered.

Seeking to verify the territories that have not yet been explored in the theme in question, this study focused on drawing the panorama of recent scientific production related to leadership. In addition, systematic and bibliometric analyzes were carried out to identify the demographic profile of the papers; check the journals and countries that have published the most about the construct; examine the papers with the greatest bibliographic coupling; analyze co-citations; and present the lexicographic exposition of the keywords of the papers.

Although leadership is contextualized as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, it is fundamental for the proper functioning of organizations (Day & Antonakis, 2012). In this sense, leaders assume a central role in processes of change and reduction of uncertainty (Neves et al., 2018), adopting a special connotation as examples and inspirers for their teams in promoting healthier and more collaborative work environments, as well as in the search the effectiveness of human resource management strategies and the achievement of better organizational results.

Regarding the achievement of a systematic literature review, the protocol proposed by Cronin, Ryan and Coughlan (2008) was adopted in three stages. The following steps were followed: (a) formulation of the research question; (b) set of inclusion and exclusion criteria; and (c) quality of the literature, the latter being used after the identification of the five most cited papers (verified by the Web of Science platform). The search was carried out in the Web of Science database, resulting in 8,122 papers published in the period from 2017 to 2019, which comprised the corpus of the research.

The collected results were subjected to analyzes of bibliographic coupling and co-citations, in addition to the co-occurrence of keywords created to identify the constructs most associated with leadership. The content of the five most cited papers was also analyzed, which supported the proposal for an agenda for future research. It is worth mentioning that the focus discussed in these studies indirectly addresses the theme of leadership because it is related to other issues in the field of human resource management and/or organizational behavior, inserted in the area of leadership.

By presenting the state of the art of scientific production and identifying research itineraries on leadership in organizations, we have achieved the objective of this systematic review of the literature. However, it should be noted that our study is limited to a single database, although it is the one with the highest coverage and brings together high impact journals, so that we are far from exhausting the literature on the subject.

Cronin, P., Ryan, F., & Coughlan, M. (2008). Undertaking a literature review: a step-by-step approach. British journal of nursing, 17(1), 38-43. Day, D. V., & Antonakis, J. (2012). Leadership: Past, present, and future. The nature of leadership, 2, 3-25. Neves, P., Almeida, P., & Velez, M. J. (2018). Reducing intentions to resist future change: Combined effects of commitment‐based HR practices and ethical leadership. Human Resource Management, 57(1), 249-261.