Mapping Military Leadership Competencies: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Leadership is a complex, dynamic phenomenon, shaped by the characteristics of the different actors involved and the relationships between them, making it a controversial and polysemic concept in the literature. In the military context, it has very specific characteristics that distinguish it and make it more demanding. For the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA), several reforms are underway, fundamentally in the field of staff training, in order to improve their performance in the exercise of their functions., The present study was driven by the following guiding question: “what military leadership competencies are described in the selected literature to be taken as a reference to the education and training of Angolan sub-officers?” For this, a systematic literature review on leadership competencies in the military context was conducted based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) method, divided into three phases: identification, screening, and inclusion. Studies were consulted on Scopus, Science Direct, SciELO and in the Open Access Scientific Repository of Portugal (RCAAP), published between January 2018 and April 2023, according to the selected inclusion and exclusion criteria. The evidences of this study highlights that military leadership competencies mobilise, integrate and transfer a range of knowledge, resources, skills and values that systematically operate to solving the problems of the military professional context, and points to three different approaches to military leadership competencies, that configure three models.