Modern organizational leaders are expected to be more adaptive in order to cope with greater volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in their task environments. As such, the concept of “adaptive leadership” has attracted sustained interest from both practitioners and scholars in the past decade. However, the concept of “adaptive leadership” remains underdeveloped as a modern organizational capability. Nevertheless, significant gaps persist in both theoretical understanding and empirical evidence, undermining the robustness and applicability of this construct. A critical and systematic review of 87 journal articles across diverse social science disciplines (e.g., Management, Applied Psychology, Education, and Nursing) published since 2000 reveals a robust conversation that is fraught with a range of conceptual and methodological challenges within the current body of literature. Key issues include: (1) lack of conceptual consistency and standardization (i.e., the jingle fallacy); (2) conflation with other leadership theories and frameworks (i.e., the jangle fallacy); (3) frequent confounding of adaptive leadership with its intended outcomes, which blurs theoretical boundaries; (4) limited and inconsistent empirical evidence supporting its effectiveness; and (5) questionable measurement approaches and research designs that weaken the validity of findings. To address these shortcomings, we propose a set of stepwise recommendations designed to resolve these conceptual and methodological issues. Our study offers a constructive roadmap for advancing scholarship in adaptive leadership, emphasizing clarity, rigor, and a more cohesive integration of theoretical and empirical insights.
