Inclusive Leadership and Project Success: A Bibliometric Analysis of Global Research Trends

Abstract

Many organizations have begun to value inclusive and participative leadership in their workplace, which has led to an increased focus on comprehending the effects that inclusive leadership has on the success of projects. This study mimics as closely as possible the structure of the uploaded benchmark bibliometric article, but uses a different topic and set of data in order to use the same overall logic. In Scopus database, 359 journal articles in English are identified and analyzed between 2011 and 2026. The purpose of the paper is to perform a bibliometric review of the inclusive leadership and project success research, focusing on publication trends, influential authors, journals, countries, affiliations, research themes and the similarity of the most cited documents. Analysis is performed with the Bibliometrix set of performance measures, VOSviewer-based keyword mapping, thematic mapping, trend analysis, and a clustering exercise based on the Pearson correlation of the top cited documents. The results reveal a significant increase in the field since 2021, which can be conceptualized as being centered around inclusive leadership, psychological empowerment, project success, transformational leadership, and psychological safety. The thematic analysis also suggests that the themes of psychological safety, innovation, job satisfaction and authentic leadership are emerging or are evolving rapidly, with project success, psychological empowerment and transformational leadership emerging as motor themes. Finally the study pinpoints the hotspots for the current research, potential for future research and the primary constraints in metadata-based bibliometric analysis.