A meta-theory in organizational leadership based on unitary ontology

Abstract

The importance of leadership on the one hand and the plurality of opinions in this field on the other hand increase the need to rethink and conduct research in this regard. The purpose of this exploratory research is to identify gaps in existing leadership theories and to present a new meta-theory to address these gaps. In this library research, we used meta-theory, which is one of the effective research methods for rethinking science. The statistical community is all the articles that investigated leadership theories. Sampling by judgmental method reached the number of 200 articles until theoretical saturation. In this research, we first categorized leadership theories based on the five paradigms of science and then identified theoretical gaps. Based on the research findings, the gaps in the organization's leadership theories go back to the material ontology that governs them, and the solution is to change the perspective towards the unificationist meta-theory and human knowledge in higher dimensions. We have presented our metatheoretical view based on unificationist theories of physics, because unificationist ontology, emphasizing the multiplicity of dimensions and the unity of forces in existence, considers the truth to be something beyond the material world.

Keywords

• organizational leadership
• metatheory
• leadership theories
• paradigm
• unitary ontology