Reviewing the romance of leadership literature: A trivializing, underdeveloped love affair?

Abstract

Despite growing recognition of collaborative forms of leadership, the romance of leadership still influences people's perceptions of effective leadership. People perceive leaders as heroic figures capable of positively transforming organizations/nations or villains responsible for adverse outcomes despite contextual and other factors. The unprecedented changes in the world of work, such as the rise of remote work, flexible work arrangements, and artificial intelligence, have transformed leader–follower dynamics and call for a reevaluation of the romance of leadership's theoretical and methodological foundations. This paper systematically reviews recent research on the romance of leadership and identifies two core themes: a sustained prevalence of leader romanticism and the risk of trivializing the nature and contextual embeddedness of leader romanticism and thus simplifying its theorizing, which also may pose ethical challenges for the domain. The paper organizes the review's findings in an integrative romance of leadership process, highlighting the narrative foundations of romanticism and its building, continuance, and sustenance, as well as the moderating and influencing processes, integrating it with Weiner's seminal work on the judgment of social responsibility. The paper ends with suggestions for future research directions to better understand the romance of leadership in a changing organizational and societal landscape.