A Review of International Empirical Research on Followership (1988-2015) - Trends and Future Directions -

Abstract

Followership has recently drawn attention from the fields of both academia and business as effective leadership is directly linked to the attitudes and behaviors of workplace followers. The variety of followership concepts and lack of empirical research are interesting and ironic gaps in followership literature. These gaps have made it difficult for followership researchers to define followership and to conduct empirical research. This study reviews the trends of followership literature and presents a comprehensive overview of empirical research published between 1988 and 2015. We included 88 articles out of 920 literatures and categorized our findings by six criteria: 1) paper type, 2) perspective, 3) research theme, 4) research purpose, 5) data collection method, 6) data analysis approaches. From these findings we describe anticipated directions for future research on followership, and discuss the contributions and limitations of this study.