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The Intellectual Structure and Evolution of Servant Leadership: Trends, Themes, and Future Research Directions

Harsh Kumar & Al Huda

To chart the intellectual facet of servant leadership research, its developmental trend, and future research strategies, this paper focuses on a bibliometric-based Review of servant leadership research. Based on 1,865 peer reviewed journal articles indexed by the Scopus database between 1977 and 2025, the analysis utilizes Biblioshiny to assess the trends in publications, sources and authors whose works have the most significant impact, patterns of collaboration, and conceptual frameworks. The results indicate that there has been a continuous development of the servant leadership field, and one can witness the growing collaboration among different countries and the presence of strong representation in the leadership, psychology, ethics, and sustainability-focus journals. The thematic and key word analysis show that the major focus is on employee-oriented results, psychological processes, and comparisons with other value-driven leadership approaches, and new themes are appeared regarding sustainability, healthcare, and green servant leadership. The development of the themes also reflects the transition to the conceptual work based on foundations to the context-focused and result-based studies. The combination of bibliometric mapping and conceptual synthesis of the research makes the study consolidate fragmented knowledge, improve the clarity of the theory, and present a future-oriented agenda to direct future servant leadership research.

Kumar, H., & Huda, AI. (2025). The Intellectual Structure and Evolution of Servant Leadership: Trends, Themes, and Future Research Directions. International Journal of Education, Modern Management, Applied Science & Social Science, 07(03(III)), 218–232.

DOI:

Article DOI: 10.62823/IJEMMASSS/7.3(III).8285

DOI URL: https://doi.org/10.62823/IJEMMASSS/7.3(III).8285


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