Ethnic leadership in Africa: A systematic literature review

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic literature review of ethnic leadership in Africa, analyzing 31 peer-reviewed articles published between 1960 and 2024 across multiple disciplines. We define ethnic leadership as the process by which individuals mobilize shared ethnic identity as a basis for influence, legitimacy, and collective action. While ethnicity is a salient organizing force across the African continent, its role in shaping leadership practices, behaviors, and outcomes remains empirically underexplored, conceptually fragmented, and peripheral to mainstream Management and Organization (M&O) research. Drawing from literary works indexed in Web of Science, Scopus, EBSCO, and Google Scholar, our review identifies four dominant thematic domains: the cultural context of ethnic leadership, its nomological network, its role in governance, and associated critiques. Findings reveal that ethnic leadership can foster cohesion, legitimacy, and community well-being; yet it may also enable favoritism, exclusion, and governance inefficiencies. Notably, empirical research on ethnic leadership within organizational contexts is limited, especially when contrasted with its more extensive treatment in political science. As such, we advance a comprehensive research agenda that calls for greater methodological diversity, the integration of indigenous African frameworks into broader leadership theory, and the development of culturally grounded, psychometrically robust, measurement tools. This research agenda positions ethnic leadership as a theoretically rich lens for examining authority, identity, and inclusion in Africa. Overall, the review’s insights have implications for building leadership theories that are both contextually grounded and globally relevant, with practical value for governance, organizational management, and inclusive development.