A systematic narrative review of prosociality in educational leadership

Abstract

Organizational scholars have vigorously and long studied being prosocial in defining ‘prosociality’ as motivation, behavior, and impact to help or benefit others. This study attempts to provide an overview of previous studies that have approached the elements of being prosocial in educational leadership contexts. However, most of the prosocial elements in education are not explicitly defined as prosociality and have not yet been systematically studied. Thus, this study explored the research questions: (a) What elements could be involved in prosociality within educational leadership? (b) Who could be involved in the process of prosociality in educational leadership? The final corpus of this study was 83 articles published between 1993 and 2016. The reviewed concepts were categorized into three themes proposed in organizational studies: prosocial motivation, prosocial behavior, and prosocial impact. Moreover, the multiple educational actors related to prosocial elements were identified. The findings provide an outline of possible directions for future research according to the three themes.