Digital Leadership and Innovation in Higher Education: A Systematic Review of Literature

Abstract

Digital leadership is increasingly recognized as a critical determinant of institutional capacity for innovation in higher education. However, the field lacks a systematic synthesis of how this relationship is conceptualized, operationalized, and evidenced across diverse institutional and national contexts. Applying PRISMA 2020 guidelines, this systematic review searched four academic databases for peer-reviewed literature published between 2019 and 2025. Of 122 initially identified records, 11 studies met the full inclusion criteria after deduplication, title/abstract screening, and full-text appraisal. The included corpus spans framework development, qualitative case studies, quantitative structural equation modeling, and systematic literature review, conducted across Indonesia, Vietnam, South Africa, China, Russia, and the Arab Gulf region. Findings indicate that digital leadership is consistently associated with innovation-enabling conditions, including digital culture, dynamic organizational capabilities, and knowledge-sharing behavior. However, its direct effect on innovation outcomes is not uniformly supported across contexts. Notably, Shen et al. (2025) found no significant direct relationship between digital leadership and green digital innovation, a finding that productively complicates the mediation-centered models reported elsewhere in the corpus. The review surfaces definitional heterogeneity, methodological fragmentation, and context-specificity as persistent challenges, and proposes implications for institutional governance, leadership development policy, and future empirical inquiry.