Leadership as Capital – Assessment, Application, and Enhancement
Leadership is increasingly recognized as a critical form of organizational capital, shaping value definition and value creation (Buchko, 2007; Batool et al., 2023), organizational culture, innova-tion (Kesting et al., 2016, Ndalamba et al., 2018), and firm performance (Nandasinghe, 2020, Yukl, 2008; Madanchian, 2017) including complexity management (Lichtenstein et al., 2006; Enang et al., 2025) and resilience (Liu et al., 2022). Leadership also plays an essential role in developing and maintaining the business networks of an organization, building its representation in public (Has-san et al., 2018), and increasing market capitalization (Nguyen and Nielsen, 2010; Halford and Hsu, 2020).
All this shows the value of good leadership, but it also makes clear that assessing this value is a very challenging task. Leadership is part of the intangible assets of an organization, but it is diffi-cult to break it down into specific measurable items. Leaders themselves might be counted as hu-man capital as well as their individual leadership styles (Goleman, 2000; Groysberg et al., 2006). However, the leadership that they can provide depends on larger organizational dynamics (Lak-shman, 2008; Cunliffe and Eriksen, 2011; Fritzsche, 2025), including the organizational structures that allow leadership to unfold, task distributions, processes, organizational culture, and individu-al characteristics of other people working there. The attempt to assess and report the value of leadership therefore unfolds the complexity, dynamics, and multilevel nature of intellectual capital in organizations (Inkinen, 2015).
Early works on measuring leadership have already been published many decades ago (Howell, 1942). Since then, different lines of research on strategy, accounting, organizational behaviour and other topics have identified many additional aspects of leadership and its assessment or reporting that call for more elaborate, comprehensive, but also context-sensitive approaches to this topic. Furthermore, the notion of leadership has evolved, reflecting new organizational forms and grow-ing opportunities for communication and collaboration across different hierarchies and larger autonomy of workers (Donnelly & Johns, 2021). With the advent of generative artificial intelli-gence and first cases of robots being installed as CEOs in firms, radically new questions about the value of leadership emerge as well.
In line with ongoing initiatives to encourage more discourse on intellectual capital and its applica-tion in academic research and industrial practice (Kianto et al., 2025), this special issue invites conceptual and empirical papers on all aspects of measuring the value of leadership. The special issue theme aims to attract submissions from scholars studying leadership across different con-texts (corporate, public, nonprofit, startups, global institutions, etc.). Scholars are welcome to take advantage of the full bandwidth of today’s approaches to intellectual capital and its valuation (see Guthrie et al., 2017), including monetary and non-monetary assessments and reporting. New access points, such as game theory and simulation or advanced cybernetics and system dynamics will also be positively received.
To help authors increase the maturity of their work, we offer a Paper Development Workshop at IEDC in Bled, Slovenia, on 19/20 Feb. 2026. Authors interested in participating in the workshop need to submit an extended abstract to research@iedc.si until 31 Dec. 2025.
List of topic areas
Potential topics for submissions include, but are not limited to:
- The relation between leadership, value creation, and market capitalization
- Performance assessments for leaders (and followers)
- Tacit knowledge and the immeasurability of leadership
- Comparative assessments of leadership styles
- Charismatic leadership and personality as a core competence
- Culture as a moderating variable for leadership impact
- Leadership assessment in recruitment processes
- Value added as an indicator of leadership effectiveness
- Storytelling approaches to leadership assessment and reporting
- Evidence-based leadership development strategies
- System dynamics of leadership and their regulation
- The role of culture for the value of leadership
- Cumulative approaches to leadership measurement
- Comparisons across industries and geographies
- Leadership scorecards
- Objective vs. subjective measures of leadership
- Data-driven leadership assessment
- AI and leadership efficiency/ effectiveness
Submissions Information
Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here.
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see here.
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to ““Please select the issue you are submitting to”.
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.
Key deadlines
Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 01/02/2026
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31/05/2026
Guest editors
Arnold Walravens, IEDC – Bled School of Management, Bled, Slovenia, Arnold.Walravens@iedc.si
Sladjana Cabrilo, I-Shou University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, sladjana@isu.edu.tw
Fu-Sheng Tsai, City University of Macau, Macau SAR, China, fusheng_tsai@cityu.edu.mo
Vladimir Dzenopoljac, Zayed University, Dubai, UAE, vladimir.dzenopoljac@zu.ac.ae
For more details refer here
