Empowering leadership has drawn the attention of scholars and administrators due to its positive attributions since 1980s. Previous research suggests that empowering leadership is broadly regarded as a desirable leadership construct (Sharma and Kirkman, 2015; Lee et al., 2018), leading to emerge a scholarly and practitioner interest on the topic (Cheong et al., 2019). It is characterised as the process of distributing power, granting autonomy and delegating responsibility to individuals or groups through specific leadership behaviours that facilitate workplace success and intrinsic motivation (Amundsen and Martinsen, 2014; Sharma and Kirkman, 2015). Empowering leadership practices of administrators contributes to employee motivation, trust and performance, resulting in greater organizational effectiveness (Kundu et al., 2019; Saleh, 2022). Considering the professional aspect of teaching profession, school administrators’ empowering leadership practices is highly influential in improving work environment and directing the motivation and potential of teachers. For this reason, a significant volume of research in the literature has been devoted to exploring empowering leadership in education organizations.

Although several studies have conducted systematic reviews on the field of leadership, few studies have carried out systematic exploration of the empowering leadership or its effectiveness (Cheong et al., 2019; Indragiri, 2022). However, no comprehensive bibliometric review has been found to explore the relational and structural features of the field of empowering leadership. Conducting a bibliometric review helps decipher the cumulative scientific knowledge in the relevant literature by providing a thorough and rigorous assessment (Donthu et al., 2021; Linnenluecke et al., 2020). In this regard, this review specifically aims to map the cumulative scientific knowledge on empowering leadership in the educational context through bibliometric analyses. In line with this aim, answers have been sought to the following research questions:

1. What is the total number of documents, their geographical distribution and development trend of empowering leadership literature?
2. Which publications, researchers, and sources have the greatest citation impact in the empowering leadership literature?
3. What is the intellectual structure of knowledge base on empowering leadership?
4. What are the topical foci of knowledge base on empowering leadership?

The current study employs bibliometric method to synthesize the knowledge base on empowering leadership in schools. Bibliometric tools facilitate the analysis of large numbers of documents extracted from a database in the context of science mapping reviews (Hallinger and Kovačević, 2019). The bibliometric data for the present study has been gathered using Scopus database since it provides a broad overview of research in social sciences and humanities (Khiste and Paithankar, 2017) and offers a more comprehensive coverage of educational administration journals compared to Web of Science (Hallinger and Kovačević, 2019). Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines have been followed to guide the identification, screening and selection process of the documents (Moher et al., 2009). During the data collection, no limit has been set for the starting date of documents, while the ending year has been restricted to 2024. The inclusion criteria have been identified as follows: 1) Document type should be limited to articles and 2) Publications should focus on educational context. The database search has been performed using the following index: TITLE (empower* AND leader*), yielding a total of 1,438 documents. Considering the inclusion criteria, publications such as book chapters, conference proceedings, book reviews and meeting abstracts has been excluded from the database. Then, the titles and content of remaining 1.156 publications published between 1985 and 2024 have been examined to exclude documents focusing research other than educational context. VOSviewer software and the R program has been utilised to analyse the bibliometric dataset. They have enabled bibliometric analyses such as citation analysis, co-citation analysis, co-word analysis, and thematic evaluation analysis. In addition, Tableau Desktop software has been used to produce the geographical heatmap showing the distribution of empowering leadership articles.

Initial review from the Scopus database has revealed 1.156 publications in the period from 1985 to 2024. Even though the review of bibliometric data is ongoing, a significant increase has been noted in the number of documents published as of 2020. It has also been noted that the publications are from a wide geography. However, a significant part of empowering leadership literature is from United States of America. Other notable contributors to the field include scholars from countries such as United Kingdom, China, Canada, Australia and Turkey. A high volume of research is from influential journals such as “Leadership & Organization Development Journal” and “Leadership Quarterly”. The suggested review will reveal scholars working in this field, theories and outcomes by most influential scholars of empowering leadership field. The review has also a strong potential to unfold newer research questions in the field and to map for potential cooperation.

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