Abstract: Inclusive leadership is a leadership style that promotes and harnesses the power of diversity. In the context of employee diversity, inclusive leadership has attracted extensive attention from both researchers and practitioners as an emerging leadership style that maximizes the benefits of diversity. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the knowledge base and research themes in inclusive leadership research, both domestically and internationally. Leveraging a sample of 330 inclusive leadership articles and 12,210 references from the Web of Science and China Knowledge Network (CNKI) databases, we employ bibliometric methods to explore annual trend, co-author analysis, geographical distribution, publication, co-citation analysis, keyword co-occurrence, and cluster analysis. The evolution of inclusive leadership research is visualized through keyword co-occurrence time zone map to compare the trajectory and trend over time (2006 to 2021) and the differences between those published in Chinese Journals and in overseas journals. Practical implications and future directions for inclusive leadership studies are discussed.

Key words: inclusive, inclusive leadership, diversity management, bibliometrics