Management Revue (MREV) is published by IMR Press from Volume 36 Issue 1 (2025). Previous articles were published by another publisher under the CC-BY licence, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement.
Can We Understand Leadership Better? A Framework for Shaping an Integrative Definition of Leadership
Le Vinh Nguyen 1,*
, Jarrod Haar 2
, Jarrod Haar 2Affiliations
Article Info
1 University of Economics, Hochiminh city (UEH), College of Business, Hochiminh city campus, Vietnam
2 Massey University, College of Business, Auckland campus, New Zealand
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Despite hundreds of existing definitions, defining leadership remains a thorny issue today. We attempted to tackle this issue and summarise here a framework being developed to shape a renewed, simplified definition of leadership. The paper first discusses several critical philosophical and linguistic principles for defining a concept. The paper then integrates these principles to build a three-step process (namely, naturisation) to trace back to the nature of the leadership phenomenon by reducing its meanings from abstraction to simplicity. As a result, and using 12 existing definitions, we found a renewed, simplified definition of leadership, which is the use of resources. This definition was finally verified by relating it to diverse bodies of knowledge and differentiating it from management. Beyond the definition and the framework, our paper potentially contributes to moderating the leadership-management distinction debate and offers some premises of leadership for future exploratio