The leadership trilogy: A review of the third decade of The Leadership Quarterly

The present research reviews the most recent ten years, 2010–2019, of the work published in The Leadership Quarterly (LQ). We follow on prior decade-focused reviews published in LQ, including the period 1990–1999 (Lowe & Gardner, 2000) and 2000–2009 (Gardner, Lowe, Cogliser, Moss & Mahoney, 2010). The present work complements and expands the first two reviews by documenting how the field has evolved with new characters, methodologies, and theories emerging while others decline and become less relevant. We extend the story of how LQ emerged from a start-up niche journal, evolved into the predominant outlet for leadership research and new theories, gained awareness of a growing need to reduce construct proliferation, and adopted increasingly sophisticated methodological techniques that call into question some of the field's prior research findings.