One of the most important things leaders do is communicate. Though research on leaders’ communication has been active for half a century, to date there has been little effort to review it comprehensively and systematically. In this paper we review 260 articles that use leaders’ actual communication (textual, aural, and video) as data. We group these studies into four broad categories as a function of whether they focus on the (1) content and style, (2) antecedents, or (3) outcomes of leader communication, or (4) use leaders’ communication data to infer leader attributes that are unrelated to communication. We document how empirical methodologies to analyze verbal and nonverbal communication have advanced over time, with early labor-intensive coding methods joined by more automatic and computer-based approaches, including Machine Learning. We conclude by discussing how this research has extended and enriched dominant leadership theories and suggest future opportunities for studies that use leader communication as a focal construct or input.

领导者所做的最重要的事情之一就是沟通。尽管关于领导者沟通的研究已经活跃了半个世纪，但迄今为止，还很少有人对它进行全面、系统的回顾。在本文中，我们回顾了 260 篇使用领导者实际沟通（文本、音频和视频）作为数据的文章。我们根据这些研究是否关注（1）内容和风格，（2）前因，或（3）领导者沟通的结果，或（4）使用领导者的沟通数据来推断领导者，将其分为四大类与通信无关的属性。我们记录了分析言语和非言语交流的经验方法如何随着时间的推移而进步，早期的劳动密集型编码方法与更自动化和基于计算机的方法（包括机器学习）相结合。最后，我们讨论了这项研究如何扩展和丰富了主导领导理论，并为使用领导者沟通作为焦点构建或输入的研究提出了未来的机会。