Mapping the intersection of artificial intelligence and leadership research: a bibliometric analysis of wos publications (2016–2024)

In the Industry 4.0 era, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are becoming increasingly widespread, studies in the field of leadership are trying to unite the issues of AI and leadership under a common roof by emphasising the main perspectives of leadership. In existing research, the interaction between AI and leadership is evaluated from three different perspectives. The first one is that AI will support leadership functions (development perspective). The second is that AI will replace leadership in the future (Replacement perspective). The third is that the influence of AI on leadership organisations is overestimated (sceptic perspective). In this study, systematic insights from multiple perspectives on the impact of AI technologies on leadership in today’s organisations has been attempted through bibliometric analysis. In this way, it is aimed to summarise the studies on AI and leadership, to identify the trends of research topics and to identify research gaps. Finally, the possible input of this study is to deliver a basis for future empirical and applied studies on related topics. The study was carried out based on the data of various types of researches in the Web of Science database and conducted between 2016 and 2024