Distributed leadership: systematic literature review

Distributed leadership is relatively new approach in the field of leadership. Consequently, detailed research outside academic or educational sector is not available as of yet. Leithwood et al. (2009) further defined distributed leadership framework as a planful alignment in which guidance, resources and roles are assigned to the individuals or groups that are effectively placed to accomplish a function or task. In this paper an overview of distributed leadership is presented by conducting strategic literature review which allows us to demarcate certain attributes of distributed leadership. Four themes of distributed leadership are identified by the systematic literature review, which include, behavioural perspective, context perspective, benefits and attributes, and performance perspective. Light is thrown upon the benefits and challenges of distributed leadership at the end of this paper.