Fresno State management professor Dr. William H. Bommer and three coauthors have won Sage Publishing’s 5-Year Scholarly Impact Award for the most cited paper in the Journal of Management, 2017-22. “Do Ethical, Authentic and Servant Leadership Explain Variance Above and Beyond Transformational Leadership? A Meta-Analysis” by Julia E. Hoch, William H. Bommer, James H. Duhlebohn and Dongyuan Wu, published in Journal of Management in 2018, has been cited 1,470 times, according to Google Scholar.
Bommer’s paper has been cited multiple times in papers published in top-ranked journals such as Journal of Business Ethics, Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Business Research and Leadership Organization Development Journal.
The paper compared three new models of leadership (authentic, ethical and servant leadership) with the established theory of transformational leadership on how well they explained measurable results such as job performance, job satisfaction and helping behavior in the workplace.
Surveying 20 years of empirical research, Bommer and his coauthors found that the authentic and ethical models did not provide better explanations of outcomes than the transformational leadership model. Servant leadership, however, showed promise for helping leadership researchers and practitioners better explain a wide range of outcomes that concern employees, managers and organizations.
Dr. Jonathan Biggane, chair of the Department of Management at Fresno State, said this is Bommer’s second 5-Year Scholarly Impact Award at Journal of Management. “Dr. Bommer has consistently proven himself as one of the most accomplished researchers in the CSU system. We’re incredibly fortunate to have Bill and look forward to his continued success,” Biggane said.
For Bommer, the value of hundreds of citations is proof that his work has helped other researchers and working managers. “This award is particularly gratifying because it shows our research has been useful. Knowing that this research has had such practical impact provides incentive to keep doing the work and continuing to make a difference. It also provides important awareness that high-quality research is being conducted at Fresno State,” Bommer said.
