Leadership: A Portrait of Brazilian Scientific Production

Leadership, a theme belonging to the organizational behavior field, has been intensively studied on the international scene for about a century. What about in Brazil? This paper aims to analyze the Brazilian scientific production on leadership published in 15 national psychology and management journals between 1996 and 2013. It consists of a systematic literature review of 35 empirical research articles about leadership roles and profiles. The findings show the predominance of cross-sectional exploratory studies that apply qualitative methods, collect data via interviews and use content analysis on data. The private sector and services received most attention. Analysis of article characteristics leads to the conclusion that Brazilian scientific production on this theme lags behind other areas of the organizational behavior field and research done abroad. We discuss core problems and challenges and propose recommendations for the further development of a national research agenda on leadership.