A Bibliometric Analysis on Ethical Leadership: The Global Trend in Scopus Database (1974-2020)

Abstract

The leadership research area has been focusing on ethical leadership. Scholars and policymakers are concerned about the unethical behaviours among leaders in several organisations. However, there were limited studies that focus on ethical leadership. There is a need to conduct a bibliometric analysis to retrieve and to scrutinise the publication on ethical leadership in order to understand the global growth of the research trend. The oldest publication started in the year of 1974 in the database of Scopus, till the recent year of 2020. VOS Viewer 1.6.11 was used to visualise and analyse the trend of ethical leadership through the data of bibliographic. The aims of this paper were to assess the publications output, analysis of co-authorship, leading institutions and countries, leading authors, and the analysis of author keywords co-occurrences. A total of 568 journal articles were retrieved for the analysis. The amount of ethical leadership publications has been escalating steadily since 2004. The United States and China were the leading countries among the affiliated countries. Four of the leading universities were from the world's top 150 universities. Among the keywords, organisational citizenship behaviour has the most link with ethical leadership, which indicated that ethical leadership is active in the management field compared to other fields such as nursing and psychology.