Natural experiments in leadership research: An introduction, review, and guidelines

Abstract Endogeneity is a serious challenge for leadership research. To overcome the problem, researchers increasingly rely upon experimental designs, such as laboratory and field experiments. In this paper, we argue that natural experiments — in the form of standard natural experiments, instrumental variable, and regression discontinuity designs — offer additional opportunities to infer causal relationships. We conduct a systematic, cross-disciplinary review of 87 studies that leverage natural experimental designs to inquire into a leadership topic. We introduce the standard natural experiment, instrumental variable, and regression discontinuity design and use topic modeling to analyze which leadership topics have been investigated using natural experimental designs. Based on the review, we provide guidelines that we hope will assist scholars in discovering natural exogenous variations, selecting the most suitable form of natural experiment and by mobilizing appropriate statistical techniques and robustness checks. The paper is addressed to leadership and management scholars who aim to use natural experiments to infer causal relationships.