Leadership Emergence: An Integrative Review

Despite significant scholarly attention and practical importance regarding who emerges as informal and formal leaders in organizations, an integrative framework of the leadership emergence literature remains elusive. The presence of such a framework proves integral for the advancement of work in this area due to the complexity of the field, coupled with its sprawling nature across multiple disciplines (e.g., management, communication, education, economics). Accordingly, in this review, we utilize a database of 270 primary studies to put forth a distal-proximal framework of leadership emergence. In particular, we systematically review past research to answer four questions: (1) what do we know about the phenomenon of leadership emergence itself, (2) what are the antecedents of leadership emergence, (3) what outcomes are associated with leader emergence, and (4) what are the boundary conditions of leadership emergence? By introducing a conceptual framework for informal and formal emergent leadership, we highlight areas of research maturity and nascency and offer several recommendations for future work in this domain. Altogether, we highlight broad theoretical implications for the leadership, teams, and individual differences literature-and elaborate upon several benefits that an integrated framework of emergent leadership provides for organizations.