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Editorial verdict
Methodologically sound systematic review with credible findings — the 90%+ Western instrument dominance statistic is robust across 117 studies, but the English-only inclusion criterion creates a significant Lusophone/Francophone blind spot that limits continental representativeness.
Executive summary
This systematic review examines the origins and types of leadership measurement instruments used in organisational leadership research conducted in Africa between 2010 and 2025. The authors argue that African leadership research remains overwhelmingly dependent on Western-developed instruments, despite sustained scholarly calls for culturally grounded measurement approaches. Using the PRISMA framework across databases including Scopus, Web of Science, EBSCOhost and Google Scholar, the review analysed 117 studies — 96 peer-reviewed articles and 21 dissertations. Key findings reveal that Western-developed instruments account for over 90% of measures used: 69% (n=81) were applied without adaptation, 21% (n=25) with adaptation, and only 9% (n=11) used African-developed instruments. Dominant instruments include the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ), Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) and Transformational Leadership Questionnaire (TLQ). Temporal analysis shows peak publication activity in 2015–2019 with a subsequent decline. The review identifies a paradox between decolonial rhetoric and continued methodological dependence on Western frameworks, attributing this to structural factors including researcher training, funding dependencies and international publishing norms. The authors conclude that accelerated development of contextually embedded, indigenously grounded leadership measures is needed across the African continent.
Key insights
- 1Over 90% of leadership measurement instruments used in African organisational research between 2010 and 2025 originated in Western contexts, with 69% applied without any cultural adaptation — a finding consistent with prior reviews by Enslin and Grobler (2025) and Hallinger (2020).
- 2A core paradox exists between decolonial and Africanisation rhetoric in academic discourse and actual methodological practice, with African-developed instruments appearing in only 9% (n=11) of reviewed studies, and those predominantly in academic theses rather than peer-reviewed journals.
- 3The English-only inclusion criterion structurally excluded Lusophone and Francophone African countries, introducing a reporting bias that further concentrates findings around Anglophone African contexts — particularly South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana — limiting the review's continental representativeness.
Practical takeaways
- Researchers operating in African organisational contexts who rely on instruments such as the ALQ, MLQ or TLQ without documented cultural adaptation or psychometric validation for local populations risk construct validity issues, as factor structures have been shown to differ from their original Western forms in African settings.
- The concentration of indigenously developed instruments in dissertations rather than peer-reviewed journals points to a structural publishing barrier; organisations and institutions involved in leadership assessment in Africa may find more contextually relevant measurement frameworks in grey literature and academic theses than in mainstream journals.
Frameworks mentioned
PRISMA
Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses — a standardised methodological framework used to guide the conduct and reporting of this systematic review, including a five-phase flow diagram for record identification, screening and inclusion.
Emic-Etic Framework
A cross-cultural research framework distinguishing between etic measures (Western-developed instruments applied without contextual adaptation), adapted etic measures (Western instruments culturally validated for African contexts), and emic measures (instruments developed indigenously within African cultural frameworks).
References
- Enslin & Grobler (2025).Organizational leadership in Africa: A structured review and suggestions for future research.
- Hallinger (2020).Science mapping the knowledge base on educational leadership and management from the emerging regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America, 1965–2018.
- Michaud et al. (2020).Development and validation of the Leadership Effectiveness in Africa and the Diaspora (LEAD) scale.
- Fourie et al. (2017).Sixty years of research on leadership in Africa: A review of the literature.
- Boer et al. (2018).On detecting systematic measurement error in cross-cultural research: A review and critical reflection on equivalence and invariance tests.
- Tolstikov-Mast et al. (2021).Handbook of international and cross-cultural leadership research processes.
- Mahembe et al. (2013).A confirmatory factor analytic study of a self-leadership measure in South Africa.
- Mahembe et al. (2017).A study to assess the reliability and construct validity of the Abbreviated Self-leadership Questionnaire: A South African study.
- Grobler & Mathafena (2021).Assessing the dimensionality of three LMX instruments within a diverse cultural and linguistic context.
- Crawford & Kelder (2019).Do we measure leadership effectively? Articulating and evaluating scale development psychometrics for best practice.
Source & Provenance
sajip
Simangele L. Mkhize, Anton Grobler
August 5, 2026
Meta-Analysis/Review
Africa
Original source metadata is preserved. AI analysis is generated separately.
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