Analysis Of Journals To Evaluate The Impact Of Social Media On Leadership

This paper provides a broad review of fifteen significant journals in the areas of leadership, strategic change and corporate responsibility. The purpose of the assignment is to progressively move towards candidacy to help clarify the general areas of research study for my dissertation. This includes being able to identify common themes, research methods and exposure to a variety of research styles and approaches primarily how to draw conclusions from research. I completed this thematic analysis by quantitatively evaluating the top three subjects for each journal based on how many times that subject was the topic of an article over the three period of this review. I then added commentary for other recurring topics that appeared hot for that time period and selected an article of interest for that journal based on what caught my attention and summarized my cumulative findings. I also included the common research methods for each journal as many of them included quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods.

My dissertation topic around how social media has changed leadership (specifically how CEOs and other senior leaders initiate two-way communication with consumers using social media) is still fairly broad. I used this review period to search for articles and other insights that would help me narrow it down and provide additional focus.

The Leadership Quarterly

According to The Leadership Quarterly (LQ), they are an “international journal of political, social and behavioral science dedicated to advancing our understanding of leadership as a phenomenon. ” This publication is published six times a year (bi-monthly) and seeks contributions from a variety of disciplines. This journal has a five-year impact factor of 4. 269 (2016) which is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. This broad view covers from Volume 26 (2015) to Volume 28 (2017) for a total of 18 issues and 195 articles.

Journal Cumulative Findings

Interestingly, the start of this review begins with a global view in leadership using Asia as the framework for research. In that initial issue, there were articles about Chinese leadership, Indian leadership, and leadership in Singapore. Over the course of the three years, The Leadership Quarterly covered many topics and had numerous themes and special issues covering Asian models of leadership, leader cognition, leadership and emotions, collective and network approaches to leadership, gender and leadership, implicit leadership and followership theories, and charisma – the issue dedicated to Boas Shamir, a well-respected leadership scholar. There were many themes throughout the years. Themes (for the purposes of this paper) are defined as topics that were discussed more than 5 times in a three year period. The top five themes were followership and leadership (8. 2%), women and leadership (7. 6%), leader traits and behaviors (7. 1%), transformational leadership theory (6. 6%), and charismatic leadership theory (6. 6%). Other frequently recurring topics include LMX leadership theory, and ethical leadership decision making. There were surprising persistent ideas throughout the journals that made me pause and ponder the relevance and frequency of their content. The large amount of articles surrounding abusive supervision made me ask myself, is this really a major problem in corporate America? The articles around this topic were extremely interesting and one in particular stood out addressing both constructive and destructive forms of leadership.

Collins and Jackson (2015) note that “There are good reasons for this shift in focus, as mounting evidence suggests that destructive leadership harms the mental and physical health of employees and degrades organizational performance. ” The lack of volume and scarcity in the number of articles on CEO leadership in general was startling. Why is there a lack of articles addressing leadership matters for CEOs, the top leadership position in an organization? There are several speculative reasons why but this is not the place for theoretical hypothesis. This will be addressed in another assignment. The few articles that were written addressed the top management team (TMT) or the CEO’s direct reports. The article with the most positive, informative content was the article that discussed the empowerment of the TMT by the CEO and the value that empowerment adds to the rest of the organization. The theory that “an empowering leadership style encompasses the encouraging of self-leadership, participative goal-setting, and opportunity thinking by followers” is the premise for this article. On some level, this way of thinking is intertwined in several leadership theories which make it rooted in research and easy to adapt for most CEOs. Much of the data collection in this journal was via literature reviews, real-life studies with managers and their teams, surveys, and analysis was done using a variety of methods including hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression.

Journal of Leadership Studies

The Journal of Leadership Studies (JLS) is a peer-reviewed journal published quarterly by the University of Phoenix. Their school of Advanced Studies is the host college for this publication. They encourage contributions from doctoral students, faculty members and practitioners to publish their research. This journal has a five-year impact factor of 0. 38 (2017). The low impact rating may be due to the disputable reputation of the University of Phoenix. It may also be rated low because many of the articles are in the symposium format and there are not a lot of research-based articles. Nonetheless, it has been around for over ten years. The broad view in this paper covers from Volume 8 (2015) through Volume 11 (2017) for a total of 12 issues and 143 articles. For the purposes of this review, I will focus on the research-based articles.

Journal Cumulative Findings

There were a variety of topics covered over the course of this three year review. The primary themes were innovation and leadership (14. 3%), leadership skills in healthcare (14. 2%) and transformational leadership (14. 2%). While these were the main themes there were other topics covered such as charismatic leadership, culturally situated leadership, humble leadership and leadership studies in graduate programs. One of the more interesting articles in this journal was around the topic of leadership graduate degrees. Stork et al (2015) make one of the more stimulating and personally relevant statements in this article when they say, “a decision was made that value propositions inviting a student to accomplish something and challenge herself or himself, appear to contribute to her or his personal (not career) development, and has the characteristics of intrinsic motivation. ” This is very true for me and my reasons for entering this PhD program. There were a variety of research methods used including internet search engines, Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, surveys, methodological tools, empirical research and interviews.

Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies

The Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies (JLOS), is a quarterly, peer-reviewed publication and according to its publisher’s page, it “seeks to advance the theory, research and practice of all aspects of leadership and organizations. ” JLOS has been published since 1993 by age Publications and is the official journal of the Midwest Academy of Management. This is a quarterly, peer-reviewed academic journal which publishes papers in the field of psychology. JLOS has an impact factor of 1. 24 (2016) and this segment includes a review of Volume 22 (2015), Volume 23 (2016) and Volume 24 (2017) for a total of 12 issues and 96 articles.

Journal Cumulative Findings

In spite of the frequency of this publication, the content is surprisingly contained under the same umbrella by issue. There weren’t a lot of recurring themes that were dominant over the 3 year review period but behavior was the dominant one, both leadership and organizational behavior. It was difficult to quantify just how much behavior showed up in the issues because it manifested itself in multiple ways and at various levels of each issue. For example, it was the dominant topic in the article entitled “Leadership and Creative Performance Behaviors in R&D Laboratories: Examining the Mediating Role of Justice Perceptions” where the authors explore the correlation between leadership and creative performance behaviors.

However, there were themes that appeared numerous times such as LMX theory, authentic leadership, responsibility, workplace bullying, organizational justice/fairness and altruistic motivation. Once again, my interest was piqued with the article on workplace bullying. Misuse and abuse of power and position is perpetrated mostly because of what Gupta and Singh found in hypothesis 2, “Group members are more likely to bully if the supervisor also bullies” (2015). There were quantitative and qualitative methods used throughout the studies in this journal. Methods such as surveys, questionnaires, structural equation modeling, regression models, and confirmatory factor analysis were used throughout JLOS.

Small Group Research

Small Group Research (SGR), according to its website, is “an international and interdisciplinary journal presenting research, theoretical advancements, and empirically supported applications with respect to all types of small group theory”. It is also peer-reviewed and published bi-monthly according to the website. SGR is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). It has an impact factor of 1. 44. This wide-ranging review includes three years’ worth of publications including Volume 46 (2015), Volume 47 (2016), and Volume 48 (2017) and is published bi-monthly or six times per year for a total of 18 issues and 72 articles over the three years.

Journal Cumulative Findings

Small Group Research offered a wide variety of thought provoking and stimulating articles around teams and small groups. In this thematic analysis, I discovered the primary topic covered was the obvious, teams and small groups, but the other themes that surfaced frequently over this three year period were interdisciplinary group research (5. 5%), small group learning (4. 2%), and the impact of cohesive groups (2. 8%). A few other recurring topics that graced the pages of SGR were group/team performance, shared leadership, diversity in teams, team effectiveness, and emotional intelligence. The title of this journal alone provides intriguing thoughts about the possibilities of small group and team topics that could be explored within the pages. As with many of the other journals, there were many articles that caught my attention but one in particular made me pause and seriously consider the ramifications of this subject matter.

The article about batterers in intimate partner violence (IPV) was shocking and provided insight about a topic I am not very familiar with but caused me to pause and seriously consider the content. Cunha and Concalves (2015) stated that, “Psychological intervention in intimate partner violence (IPV) was initially directed to the victims, forgetting the offender”. Once they started focusing on the perpetrator, his intrinsic motivation is what determined his success rate or probability of changing. Throughout the seventy two articles, there were many research methods employed such as interviews, surveys, questionnaires, field samples, group-actor partner interdependence model, bibliometric method, culturomics, and literature reviews.

Journal of Business Ethics

JBE “publishes only original articles from a wide variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives concerning ethical issues related to business that bring something new or unique to the discourse in their field”, according to the publisher’s website. It has an impact factor of 2. 35 and is published bi-monthly. This comprehensive review covers three years which include Volumes 126 – 132 (2015), Volumes 133 – 139 (2016), and Volumes 140 – 146 (2017) and equates to 18 issues and 1,024 articles.

Journal Cumulative Findings

This journal contained the highest quantity of journals in the context of this comprehensive review. There was a clear theme that stood out during this general review besides the obvious, ethics. The primary topic discussed throughout this collection of JBE journals was social responsibility of business at 12. 5%. The second most discussed topic was – not surprising – business ethics (7. 3%) and the third most discussed topic was organizational performance/structure/change at 4. 5%. There were overabundances of topics covered in addition to the primary aforementioned themes. Other popular topics included leadership, research, accounting and consumers.

The article of interest in this journal was one titled “For-Profit Education: The Sleep of Ethical Reason”. This article drew me in because of my marketing experience in the for-profit education sector. The arguments posed by Natale et al (2015) are valid on the surface but then lack rooted evidence beyond that. To say the business and “profit” model is the reason for their lack of concern for all things academia is the part of framing reserved for making moral judgments. One of the statements that stood out in this article surrounded the idea of adding new ideas to a given subject matter, “…the for-profit educational institutions generally are not involved in intellectual and scholarly inquiry. Their goal, it would appear, is not the development of new knowledge, but rather the absorption of standardized information which can be applied in a mechanical manner as well as job training”.