Grounded in Causality: Elevating Evidence for Leadership Practice

CALL FOR PAPERS

Grounded in Causality: Elevating Evidence for Leadership Practice

Journal: The Leadership Quarterly

Publisher: Elsevier

Submission Deadline: 22 November 2026

Introduction

Leaders — whether frontline managers, senior executives, or elected politicians — are often responsible for establishing new policies, procedures, and strategies. Ideally, such decisions are grounded in rigorous, evidence-based research. Internally valid research that demonstrates causality and is relevant to practical challenges is particularly informative.

Building on The Leadership Quarterly's tradition of publishing research that can inform practice, this Special Issue invites submissions that seek to elevate leadership practice through rigorous, causal research.

To demonstrate causality, three conditions must be met — the causal effect of one variable on another can be surmised when the independent variable temporally precedes the outcome, the two are reliably correlated beyond chance, and the association cannot be explained by other causes. Meeting the third condition is often the most challenging — even randomized experiments may not precisely identify causal mechanisms. Researchers must navigate tradeoffs between practical constraints and validity while drawing on a range of creative study designs that allow for both strong internal and external validity.

Scope & Significance

This Special Issue recognises that universal generalizability is not required for an observed relationship to be informative — but practitioners and scholars alike benefit as the conditions under which a relationship is likely to be present become better understood. Replication studies, causal designs, and practice-focused research are all essential to building a robust evidence base for leadership.

The Special Issue welcomes contributions from across scientific disciplines — including management, psychology, biology, anthropology, computer science, economics, political science, and sociology — as long as findings are informative for leadership and management research.

Open science practices — including open-access data, code, and measures, as well as study pre-registrations — are strongly encouraged.

List of Topic Areas

Manuscripts are invited on themes including, but not limited to:

1. Field studies leveraging exogenous events to explore the causal effects of shifting contexts on leadership processes

2. Replication and generalizability studies — confirming which leadership effects are robust across contexts and identifying boundary conditions

3. Studies examining leadership development and coaching interventions with clear causal evidence — including persistence or decay of effects over time

4. Research comparing leadership modalities — virtual versus face-to-face coaching or training — providing actionable guidance for hybrid and remote work contexts

5. Intervention studies testing how organizations can best support leaders in adapting to crises, technological change, or societal challenges

6. Studies using AI or machine learning to generate insights into leadership behaviors, program effects, and organizational outcomes — complemented by causal research designs

7. Studies testing mechanisms that facilitate the scaling of interventions — from single leaders to populations of leaders

8. Mixed methods studies combining quantitative causal designs with qualitative analysis of mechanisms

9. Methodological best practice papers — quasi-experimental designs, regression discontinuity designs, staggered training interventions

10. Replication studies that strengthen or qualify confidence in previously established leadership findings

11. Studies on charismatic, transformational, and other leadership styles using experimental or quasi-experimental designs

12. Practice-focused research grounded in needs analysis, stakeholder perspectives, and real organizational challenges

13. Leadership in crisis contexts — causal evidence from natural experiments and exogenous events

14. Goal setting, feedback, and motivation — experimental and causal approaches to leadership interventions

15. Leader gender, diversity, and inclusion — causal analyses of leadership outcomes

Submission Types Accepted

• Completed studies and full papers

• Registered report proposals (Introduction and Methods for review prior to data collection)

• Results-blind review submissions (Introduction and Methods for review after data collection)

Guest Editors

Dr. Andy Loignon (Contact for Topic Inquiries) Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA Email: loignona@ccl.org

Prof. Paulo Arvate Getúlio Vargas Foundation School of Business Administration of São Paulo, Brazil

Prof. Tiffany Keller Hansbrough Binghamton University, New York, USA

Prof. Billy Obenauer University of Maine, Orono, USA

Key Deadlines

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 22 November 2026 (Submissions accepted on a rolling basis — submit as early as possible)

Note: Researchers submitting registered reports are encouraged to submit well in advance of the deadline to ensure adequate time for data collection.

Submission Guidelines

Submit your manuscript via The Leadership Quarterly's EVISE submission system:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/the-leadership-quarterly

Submissions should be prepared in accordance with The Leadership Quarterly's Guide for Authors available on the journal webpage. The Special Issue team will pre-assess all submitted manuscripts and, upon fit, send them out to the journal's double-blind review process.

All submissions must be original and must not be under review elsewhere at the time of submission.

For questions regarding the appropriateness of a manuscript topic, contact Dr. Andy Loignon at loignona@ccl.org.

About the Journal

The Leadership Quarterly, published by Elsevier, is a premier international peer-reviewed journal with a CiteScore of 18.3 and Impact Factor of 9.7. It supports open access publishing and is dedicated to advancing theoretical and empirical research on leadership — providing a leading global platform for interdisciplinary scholarship exploring leadership processes, development, effectiveness, and their implications for organizations and society across diverse contexts worldwide.

ServiceSetu Academics — Premier Platform for Academic Opportunities & Research Collaboratio

Visit official website of the publisher