RECONCEPTUALIZING WOMENPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP IN SMEs: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW ON LEGITIMACY, CONTEXT, AND PERFORMANCE
This study reconceptualizes women's entrepreneurial leadership in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through a systematic literature review. The focus is on highlighting legitimacy and contextual linkages, as well as firm performance. Although women entrepreneurs play a crucial role in SME development, existing research broadly evaluates leadership through instrumental performance indicators, often ignoring the social and institutional processes through which leadership is recognized and sustained. This review follows the PRISMA protocol and draws on peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and conference proceedings published in reputable outlets indexed in Scopus. Based on a systematic review of studies across various geographic contexts (from 2016-2026), this article synthesizes key publication trends, thematic clusters, and contradictory findings in the women's entrepreneurship literature. The review reveals three dominant patterns. First, leadership in women-led SMEs is largely treated as an individual capability, measured by firm outcomes, reinforcing performance-driven, gender-neutral leadership models. Second, cultural norms and institutional environments strongly shape leadership opportunities, yet remain weakly integrated into leadership theorization. Third, leadership legitimacy emerges as a critical yet under-theorized construct that mediates the relationships among individual agency, contextual constraints, and SME outcomes. Based on these insights, this study proposes an integrative conceptual framework that positions women's entrepreneurial leadership as a socially embedded, legitimacy-dependent process rather than a mere managerial function. Shifting the analytical focus from performance alone to the interplay among agency, context, and legitimacy can lead to more inclusive, context-sensitive theories of leadership and entrepreneurship. These findings may have implications for future empirical research and policy design, thereby strengthening the role of women's leadership in SMEs.
Contextual Embeddedness, Leadership Legitimacy, SMEs, Systematic Literature Review, Women Entrepreneurship, Womenpreneurial Leadership.