Call for paper: Deciphering Leadership Conundrum in an Era of Innovation and Disruption

Deciphering Leadership Conundrum in an Era of Innovation and Disruption

Social, environmental, and economic factors coupled with technological advancements are key drivers shaping the global business landscape for transformation (Bennett & Lemoine, 2014; Schoemaker, Heaton, & Teece, 2018). In addition, increasing managerial complexity, has been cited as one of the factors that drives leaders to strive harder to not only survive in operating in dynamic environments but also cause them to thrive (Haque, Aydin & Uysal, 2017).

Innovation promotes organizational change by offering more efficient processes, fresh markets, and new investment opportunities (Kaur & Ferreira-Sutherland, 2024). In other words, innovation works as a pull factor that provides incentives for leaders to ensure they stay competitive. On the other hand, disruption forces organizations to adapt to changes because of external threats like geopolitical risks, economic recessions, industry upheavals, and technological shifts.

Existing literature has traces of innovation being considered as a pull factor indirectly. For instance, Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim and Mauborgne (2005) discussed businesses creating new market spaces rather than competing in saturated markets while Tim Brown argued that the culture of innovation and experimentation enables leader to remain proactive in uncertain environments (Gonen, 2019).

Current gaps in literature

While existing research has explored leadership and strategy in isolation, there remains a critical gap in understanding how these fields converge to address the interconnected challenges of the modern era (Hodgkinson & Healey, 2011).

Although, the literature has traces of relationship between entrepreneurship and leadership in dynamic markets (Pauceanu et al., 2021), conclusive evidence is still lacking regarding how disruption and innovation influence leaders in general, and more specifically entrepreneurial leaders, to strategize and lead startups, scale-ups, and established businesses. Moreover, with rapidly changing environment, the entrepreneurial leadership concept has widely gain attraction, but the effectiveness of entrepreneurial leadership in emerging and advanced economies require further exploration (Haque, 2025).

Existing literature has confirmed dark leadership tendencies affecting the organizational effectiveness (Milosevic et al., 2020). This issue explores the dark side of leadership: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy to find strategies to not only identify but mitigate such dark tendencies in different types of organizations and understand the role of organizational culture and governance in promoting or reducing toxic leadership (Milosevic et al., 2020). By exploring how strategy and leadership interact dynamically, this special issue seeks to close this gap by addressing both new opportunities as well as critical ethical dilemmas thus may affect leadership in discovering the meaning of leadership Conundrum in an era of innovation and disruption. Therefore, this special issue intends to fill several identified gaps in the research.

Aims and Scope

This special issue provides a platform for practitioners, scholars and professionals to present actionable (practical) insights and innovative research on leadership in VUCA environment. Thus, this special issue aims to explore how organizations can integrate a strategic foresight with leadership frameworks to overcome challenges posed by VUCA environment.

Key questions include:

In an evolving global landscape that is characterised by innovation and disruption:

How are leadership models evolving to embrace emerging innovations.
How are leaderships style adapting to disruptions to engender strategic agility.
Which resilience strategies are being implemented for strategic transformations.

List of topic areas

This special issue invites conceptual, empirical (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods), and theoretical papers that bridges the gap between theories and practical application that focus on discovering and answering Leadership difficult questions and or problem in an Era of innovation and disruption.

Themes and topics included, but not limited to the following:

Leadership in the Digital Age
- Investigating and redefining the role of leadership in the digital age where decision-making, skills, and roles are affected by blockchain, AI and digital transformation (Loureiro, Guerreiro, & Tussyadiah, 2021).
Sustainability through Strategy Leadership
- Long-term growth and sustenance through incorporating social responsibility and environmental concerns into corporate strategies (Gorski, 2017).
Crisis Leadership and Resilience
- Importance of risk management and agile leadership in dealing with geopolitical conflicts, global crises (pandemics), and economic recessions (Chisiwa, 2024).
Entrepreneurial Leadership and Innovation
- Disruption and uncertainty as leading phenomena to strategize and lead startups, scale-ups, and established businesses (Haque, 2025).
Dark Leadership Tendencies
- Developing comprehensive understanding and tackling toxic leadership behaviors, especially dark traits – narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopath behavior behind unethical decision-making (Milosevic et al., 2020).
Leadership and Future of Work
- Constantly changing work environment driving leaders to address skills gaps, increase workforce adaptability, and manage hybrid teams across the globe (Musaigwa & Kalitanyi, 2024; Mahadik et al., 2024).
Ethical AI Governance
- Inclusivity, transparency, and corporate accountability governed in accordance with the technological advancement (Du & Xie, 2021), reflecting the importance of striking balance.
Strategic Decision-Making under Uncertainty
- Understanding and evaluating strategies and leadership approaches affecting organizational success and team dynamics in VUCA environment (Haque et al., 2017; Chisiwa, 2024).

Call to action

This special issue contributes significantly to strategy and leadership research by bridging theoretical insights with practical applications. This special issue welcomes articles that present fresh insights, propose novel frameworks, offer empirical evidence, and actionable suggestions to academia and industry This issue is specifically seeking research that examines leadership and strategic management in VUCA world.

Submission 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.

Each paper submitted to this special issue will be subjected to the following review procedures:

Reviewed by the guest editors for general suitability for this special issue.
If it is suitable, reviewers with relevant expertise, minimum two and maximum three, will be selected for a rigorous double-blind review process.
Based on the recommendation of the reviewers, the guest editors and the Editor-in-Chief will take a decision whether to accept the paper in its current state, revise and re-submit, or reject.