Mission accomplished?: Research methods in the first five years of Leadership

Abstract

Taking its lead from a growing literature dealing with the research methods employed in management and adjacent disciplines and from the editors’ goal of encouraging a diversity of methodological positions in the pages of Leadership, this article reports the findings of a content analysis of the research methods employed in empirical articles during the journal’s first five years of publication. Particularly in comparison with a comparable study of the North American journal, The Leadership Quarterly, the content analysis findings reveal a greater tendency to employ a qualitative than a quantitative research approach and for qualitative interviewing and the qualitative analysis of documents to be predominant methods of data collection. At the same time, the findings also reveal similarities with traditional journals in terms of the methods employed, such as a relatively low take up of mixed-methods research.