The Devil is in the Details: Zooming out in Leadership Research

Leadership research has evolved towards increasing conceptual and methodological precision, yielding refined constructs and robust empirical insights. However, this editorial argues that a singular focus on precision risks fragmenting the field and distancing scholarship from the complex realities of organizational life. Drawing on contributions from JMS, this thematic collection illustrates how leadership is a dynamic, contextually embedded phenomenon shaped by interdependent forces. By ‘zooming out’, scholarship can better reflect the messy, adaptive nature of leadership and offer more actionable insights for leaders navigating today’s organizational challenges. We propose a multidimensional framework – breadth, depth, and height – to reintroduce complexity into leadership studies. Breadth captures the diversity of leadership styles and disciplinary perspectives; depth explores the psychological, symbolic, and relational undercurrents of those diverse perspectives; and height examines how diverse perspectives play out differently across hierarchical levels and systems.