“Leadership as Capital: Assessment, Application, and Enhancement”*

Call for Papers – Special Issue: “Leadership as Capital: Assessment, Application, and Enhancement”*

Journal: Strategy & Leadership
Publisher: Emerald Publishing
Submission deadline: 31 May 2026

This special issue treats leadership as a form of organisational capital, exploring how to measure, apply, and enhance its value across corporate, public, nonprofit, and global‑institutional settings. It invites conceptual and empirical work on the intellectual‑capital dimensions of leadership, linking leadership to firm value, resilience, innovation, and culture, and reflecting on how digitalisation and AI‑driven tools are reshaping how leadership is assessed and developed.

Why this issue matters

• Good leadership significantly influences strategy, culture, innovation, complexity management, and resilience, yet it remains a largely intangible and hard‑to‑measure asset embedded in both people and organisational systems.

• Accounting and management‑research communities are increasingly trying to quantify leadership’s contribution to value creation and market capitalisation, while also grappling with tacit knowledge, subjectivity, and context dependence.

• With the rise of generative AI and digital leadership tools, this SI provides a timely forum to rethink what constitutes leadership‑value capital and how to assess it in new organisational forms.

Key themes and research topics

Submissions can span strategy, organisational behaviour, HR, and accounting/intellectual‑capital literatures. Suggested topics include:

• Valuation and reporting of leadership

  • Links between leadership, value creation, and market capitalisation; “value‑added” indicators of leadership effectiveness.

• Leadership‑performance assessment

  • Comparative assessments of leadership styles, objective vs. subjective measures, and leadership scorecards.

• Tacit knowledge and immeasurability

  • Managing the immeasurable aspects of leadership and how to design cumulative, multi‑source assessment systems.

• Culture, context, and geography

  • How organisational and national culture moderates the impact and value of leadership; cross‑industry and cross‑geography comparisons.

• Recruitment and development

  • Leadership assessment in recruitment, storytelling approaches to leadership reporting, and evidence‑based leadership development.

• System‑level and dynamic views

  • System dynamics and regulation of leadership processes, complexity‑ and adaptability‑oriented leadership frameworks.

• Data‑driven and AI‑enabled assessment

  • Data‑driven leadership assessment, AI‑based tools for leadership evaluation, and AI‑impact on leadership efficiency and effectiveness.

Guest editors

• Dr Arnold Walravens, IEDC – Bled School of Management, Slovenia

• Dr Sladjana Cabrilo, I‑Shou University, Taiwan

• Prof Fu‑Sheng Tsai, City University of Macau, Macau SAR, China

• Dr Vladimir Dzenopoljac, Zayed University, UAE

Key dates and submission details

• Submission window: 1 February 2026 – 31 May 2026

• Submission platform: Scholar One Manuscripts for Strategy & Leadership:
  https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sl

• During submission, choose the special issue title “Leadership as Capital – Assessment, Application, and Enhancement” in the drop‑down menu.

• Manuscripts must be original and not under consideration elsewhere while under review for this journal.

• A Paper Development Workshop is offered at IEDC, Bled (Slovenia) on 19–20 February 2026; extended abstracts can be sent to research@iedc.si by 31 December 2025 for consideration.

This SI is ideal for leadership scholars, organisational behaviour researchers, and management‑development specialists interested in leadership as intellectual or relational capital, and in innovative approaches to measuring and enhancing leadership value.

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