Virtual Leadership in the Digital Era: A Global Bibliometric Analysis of Global Trends, Key Influencers, and Emerging Research Themes

Abstract

Through the use of bibliometric analysis, the study seeks to highlight worldwide research patterns and future directions for virtual leadership research during the past two decades (2000–2024).The research employs bibliometric analysis to examine co-authorship, co-occurrence, citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-citation analysis in 199 papers on virtual leadership that were extracted from the Scopus database (2 July 2024). It does this by using performance analysis and scientific mapping. The most significant authors, articles, Journals, organizations, and countries were examined. VOSviewer software was employed in the study as a performance analysis and science mapping tool. The most productive years were 2023 and 2024 with 41 publications and the most impactful institutes and countries are Binghamton University and the country is the United States, respectively. Similarly, the most influential journal is “Organizational Dynamics”, furthermore, the most cited article is “E-leadership: Implications for theory, research, and practice”. The authors also identified four thematic clusters of Research on virtual leadership, the four theme groupings are E-Leadership, Digital Leadership Capability, Sustainable Performance, and Mediated Communications. This study provides guidance for academics and details on the current status of research in the area of virtual leadership literature. It also suggests future paths of inquiry for this field of study. Through the identification of important influencers and theme clusters, this study provides a thorough bibliometric analysis of virtual leadership, contributing to a better knowledge of the subject and directing future research efforts.