Knowledge Management and Leadership: a bibliometric analysis and systematic literature review

While effectively managing knowledge is fundamental for company in order to survive and prosper in a turbulent environment, leadership acts as an orchestrator for knowledge creation, acquisition, utilization, and integration inside the organization. Considering the pivotal role of the interconnection of these two variables for companies’ success, we propose an overview of the evolution of the literature regarding the knowledge management-leadership relationship published over the last twenty years. We performed a bibliometric analysis and a systematic literature review over a dataset of 488 peerreviewed articles published from 1990 to 2018, We discover the existence of four main thematic clusters respectively focused on the following aspects of knowledge management and leadership: human and relational, systematic and performance, contextual and contingent, cultural and learning. The paper also presents a detailed set of future research avenues (RAs) grounded on the currently available literature and aimed at helping scholars in addressing numerous unsolved research question. In this connection, we propose two types of research RAs to guide further research on the topic object of our analysis, namely, exploitative RAs and explorative RAs. The first are avenues that have been investigated but still present a stimulating potential for further development. Explorative RAs refer to directions that have not been investigated or have been investigated to a minimal extent.