Rethinking Leadership Paradigms

<p>Leadership is frequently portrayed as a primary architect of organizational culture, shaping values, norms, and behavior through symbolic, discursive, and structural means. While normative literature often associates leadership with positive cultural transformation, empirical studies remain fragmented, theoretically shallow, and inattentive to contextual variation. This systematic literature review (SLR) critically examines how leadership functions as a mechanism of cultural construction, reproduction, or transformation in organizations. It aims to synthesize empirical insights and identify the leadership styles, mechanisms, and contextual conditions that shape cultural outcomes across organizational settings. Following PRISMA guidelines, forty-seven empirical peer-reviewed studies published between January 2020 and April 2025 were selected from Scopus and Web of Science. PRISMA stages (identification, screening, eligibility, inclusion) were applied using pre-specified inclusion/exclusion criteria, with duplicate removal and abstract/full-text screening conducted to ensure empirical relevance to leadership–culture relations. The review included qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods studies and employed thematic synthesis to analyze leadership styles, influence mechanisms, cultural outcomes, and mediating contextual factors. Given the interpretive synthesis focus, formal checklist-based quality appraisal tools (e.g., CASP [Critical Appraisal Skills Programme] or GRADE [Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation]) were not applied; instead, studies were retained based on empirical grounding, analytical transparency, and relevance to the review questions. Findings reveal a dominance of transformational leadership discourse, with limited critical engagement with alternative styles or informal leadership practices. Mechanisms such as role modeling and empowerment were frequently cited but often yielded variable effects, depending on institutional logic, subcultural dynamics, and structural constraints. The review also identified significant gaps in cross-cultural theorization, middle-management perspectives, and recursive models of cultural influence. This review challenges instrumentalist and leader-centric accounts of cultural influence, advocating for a more nuanced, context-sensitive, and critically informed understanding of leadership as cultural work. It highlights the need for future research to attend to the political, symbolic, and practice-based dimensions of leadership, especially in non-Western and hybrid organizational contexts.</p>