Leadership canvas: towards a leadership meta-theory

Purpose The voluminous research on leadership, along with multiple theories, makes it challenging for organizational leaders, managers, and trainers to keep track of and reconcile the different theories of leadership to derive benefits from them. We propose a leadership canvas as a meta-theory of leadership theories, integrating the major existing theories by highlighting the unifying principles that underpin these theories. Design/methodology/approach This paper has been triggered by students’ and executives’ questions regarding leadership theories and how they choose one over the other. In this paper, we have coded the leadership theories and plotted them on the two-dimensional framework using two dimensions: (1) the collaboration between leader and followers engrained in the theories, and (2) the leader focus, as implied by the different theorists. Findings Our proposed two-dimensional leadership canvas reveals that concepts in theories lower on the canvas are necessary conditions for theories higher on the leadership canvas. Thus, our framework illustrates how different leadership theories are part of a continuum rather than distinct from each other. Originality/value The proposed framework ensures a bird’s eye view of the theories, facilitating rapid comprehension of existing leadership theories regardless of readers’ prior knowledge. It also incorporates environmental complexity and leader focus in a single framework.