Review of Recent Developments in Leadership Theories

Abstract

Due to its importance to an organization, leadership has been one of the hottest topics in organizational science for decades, resulting in a proliferation of theories. To account for recent development of leadership theories, we conducted a review of the literature on the subject that covers the past 15 years (2002-2017). This paper aims at studying new development in leadership theory such as evolutionary leadership, the relationship between personality traits and leadership styles, and leadership culture, questioning their practicality, and giving directions for future research. Our review was carried out from a relational perspective: Leader-member relationship and individual-organization relationship. Having in view the evolutionary theory, we observed similarities between the five levels of leadership, leadership styles and types of organization culture.