A systematic literature review of leadership styles for effective decision-making in the VUCA environment

Purpose: The importance of the characteristics of managers and leaders in the success of organizations and their decision-making methods and styles in turbulent and uncertain environments is not hidden from anyone. Considering that decision-making in the VUCA environment should be quick and decisive and ambiguity and complexity should also be taken into account, therefore the purpose of this study is to know the cognitive skills that managers and leaders should utilize for the organization during the VUCA environment. Therefore, the current research aims to find out: What leadership styles and cognitive skills do leaders/managers need to guide the organization and make effective decisions in the VUCA environment?

Method: A systematic literature review was used to conduct this research as the number and range of leadership styles and cognitive models in the management literature are many and do not have a specific systematic structure. Also, the systematic study helps the researchers understand the existing theoretical gap, similarities, and differences of theoretical literature. At the end of the systematic review, a model for the cognitive skills of leaders and managers, based on leadership styles, has been identified and presented, so the approach of this research is "exploratory". In this research, a systematic review was conducted based on the seven-step model of Kitchenham and Charters.

Findings: In this research, first, the guiding questions were defined and then the keywords were determined. Then the databases were selected and, the exclusion and addition criteria were determined. By searching in the specified databases and based on keywords, a total of 2163 items including books, articles, and theses were collected. Caldwell framework was used to measure the quality of selected texts. For analysis, first, a code was assigned to each document; then open coding was done to categorize the texts.

After the initial coding, the categories and themes found were classified to identify leadership styles, skills and capabilities in the VUCA environment. In the selected texts, various approaches and concepts have been used to describe leaders and managers in the VUCA environment, which shows the importance of the topic in today's business world. While in the early years of 2000, there was no need to study these issues, gradually the business environment was mixed with ambiguity, complexity, stormy changes, and uncertainty, and then new models were presented in leadership. In this research, after classifying the categories, three key themes in leadership in the VUCA environment were identified.

Conclusion: This research took a new look at the topic of leadership skills by considering the VUCA environment and its impact on the decision-making process of managers and leaders based on cognitive skills and leadership styles, while most previous studies examine leadership styles or behaviors from the perspective of specific issues such as its impact on innovation, organizational knowledge, or sustainable development, or they have examined leadership in family companies, or based on a specific culture or environment, or even based on nationality or gender.