Abstract
The article systematically explores exogenous shocks in leadership and management research. It introduces a special issue of The Leadership Quarterly emphasizing how naturally occurring events like financial crises, pandemics, and regulatory changes can be used for empirical research. Then, it reviews various conceptualizations and ways of integrating exogenous shocks into empirical strategies. Finally, it categorizes exogenous shocks based on their extent, timescale, and granularity of intervention, highlighting challenges in causal identification.