From fragmentation to integration: reframing adaptive leadership through an integrative review

Adaptive leadership describes how individuals and organisations diagnose and respond to complex challenges that cannot be solved by technical expertise alone and instead require collective learning and behavioural change. This emerging leadership approach has gained significant traction as a response to increasing organisational complexity and uncertainty, particularly within practitioner circles. However, despite its widespread appeal, academic research on adaptive leadership remains conceptually fragmented, theoretically underdeveloped, and methodologically inconsistent. This integrative review critically evaluates 278 scholarly works across both academic and grey literatures to assess the current state of adaptive leadership scholarship. Our analysis reveals key challenges including conceptual ambiguity between dominant theoretical perspectives, lack of theoretical integration, and methodological challenges including, lack of academic rigour and unsound research design choices. In response, this review makes two key contributions. First, we propose a processual conceptualisation and a new definition of adaptive leadership that meaningfully integrates the two dominant theoretical perspectives of Heifetz et al. (The practice of adaptive leadership: tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world, Harvard Business Press, Brighton, 2009) and Uhl-Bien and Marion (Leadersh Q 20:631–650, 2009), revealing the co-constitutive nature of practices and processes that underpin adaptive leadership enactment. Second, we provide the first systematic and integrative identification of empirically grounded adaptive leadership processes and practices across disciplinary contexts that forms part of this integrative review. Through systematic analysis, we identify five emergent processes: diagnosing the system, identifying and framing adaptive challenges, collective activation, regulating distress, and generative friction. These provide a first, comprehensive empirical architecture for understanding adaptive leadership. These contributions offer critical foundations for future research while addressing the field's theoretical and methodological fragmentation, ensuring adaptive leadership's continued relevance in both scholarship and practice.