Leadership Management in Contemporary Organizations: An Interpretive Qualitative Review of Practices, Challenges, and Implications

Gestão da Liderança nas Organizações Contemporâneas: Uma Revisão Qualitativa Interpretativa das Práticas, Desafios e Implicações

Abstract

Over the past decades, organizations have experienced accelerated transformation driven by globalization, intensified competition, and rapid technological development. These forces have reshaped organizational structures, work arrangements, and cultural expectations, amplifying the complexity of leadership and the demands placed on managers. Despite extensive scholarship on leadership styles and competencies, the literature remains conceptually fragmented across key domains—strategic alignment, trust-building, communication, emotional intelligence, motivation, inclusion, and ethics—particularly under digitally mediated and hybrid work settings. This interpretive qualitative literature review synthesizes contemporary leadership management practices emphasized in foundational and recent leadership studies. Using a bibliographic and reflective analytical approach, the review identifies a set of interrelated leadership requirements for contemporary contexts: (a) strategic alignment and shared leadership, (b) trust-building through continuous feedback and psychological safety, (c) communication grounded in active listening and transparency, (d) emotional intelligence for conflict management and performance regulation, (e) recognition practices to sustain motivation, (f) cultural adaptability and inclusion to leverage diversity, and (g) ethical responsibility and social legitimacy as core leadership imperatives. The findings are integrated into a conceptual framework that positions communication and emotional intelligence as cross-cutting enablers that condition the effectiveness of trust, recognition, inclusion, and adaptive decision-making—especially under digital acceleration. The study concludes that effective leadership management is not reducible to a single universal model; rather, it depends on leaders’ contextual adaptation while sustaining ethical responsibility, inclusive culture, and long-term development of people and systems.