Organizational Change and Leadership: A Bibliometric Analysis

In this article, we present the main results concerning the bibliometric analysis we developed for exploring the relationship between leadership and organizational change. Today, change is a constant in organizations, and leadership is one of the main factors affecting its outcome. The main objective of this work is to provide a complete overview of the studies discussing the two chosen intertwined topics, that could represent a valid starting point for developing future research directions. The bibliometric analysis was carried out on 359 articles published in journals belonging to the AJG ranking. We carried out the descriptive analysis of the dataset as well as the thematic analysis. For the latter, beyond the Authors’ keywords distribution and co-occurrence analysis, we developed the thematic evolution, considering three specific phases in the publication trend, specifically 1974–2004, 2005–2014, and 2015–2023. We provide a description of the main themes debated in each phase as well as the most contributing papers.