Effective leadership has been identified as important for organizational success by increasing agility (Lewis et al., 2014), change management capability (Kotter, 2013), employee commitment, trust, and job satisfaction (Top et al., 2015), follower willingness to provide extra effort (Benjamin and Flynn, 2006), creative behavior (Zhang and Zhou, 2014), information technology (IT) success via IT-business alignment (Luftman et al., 1999), and IT capability reputation (Lim et al., 2013). IT continues to increase in importance as a context for organizational behavior research as IT firms establish large industries as well as accounting for significant recurring and discretionary expenditure in other organizations. Theories of effective leadership behaviors, such as transformational leadership (TL), have been well established. However, we currently lack an understanding of how to develop effective leadership skills (Akdere, 2015a; Avolio, Walumbwa and Weber, 2009; Avolio, Reichard, Hannah, Walumbwa and Chan, 2009; Bono and Judge, 2004; Day et al., 2014). Since leadership is highly context bound (Smaltz et al., 2006), leadership and its development should be examined in a highly contextualized setting. Little to no research has examined leadership development in the IT context. Additionally, a recent survey of Society for Information Management members, including 485 chief information officers (CIOs), indicated that leadership is the most important soft skill for IT employees and the second hardest soft skill to find among them (Kappelman, Johnson, McLean and Torres, 2016; Kappelman, Jones, Johnson, McLean and Boonme, 2016). Therefore, this paper investigated the emerging topic of leadership and its development in the IT context via an integrative literature review. The following section first introduces the leadership and leadership development process, paying particular attention to leadership behaviors and styles uncovered in the literature review. This review fills the IT leadership development gap by accomplishing the following: describing effective TL behaviors because it has been studied more than other types of leadership in the IT context and proposing programs for developing leadership skills and sustainable competitive advantage in the IT context.