Leadership Research Summary:
- Digital technology has changed organizations in an irreversible way. Like the movable type printing accelerated the evolution of our history, digitalization is shaping organizations, work environment and processes, creating new challenges leaders have to face. Social science scholars have been trying to understand this multifaceted phenomenon, however, findings have accumulated in a fragmented and dispersed fashion across different disciplines, and do not seem to converge within a clear picture.
- To overcome this shortcoming in the literature and foster clarity and alignment in the academic debate, this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the contribution of studies on leadership and digitalization, identifying patterns of thought and findings across various social science disciplines, such as management and psychology. It clarifies key definitions and ideas, highlighting the main theories and findings drawn by scholars. Further, it identifies categories that group papers according to the macro level of analysis (e-leadership and organization, digital tools, ethical issues, and social movements), and micro level of analysis (the role of C-level managers, leader’s skills in the digital age, practices for leading virtual teams).
- Main findings show leaders are key actors in the development of a digital culture: they need to create relationships with multiple and scattered stakeholders, and focus on enabling collaborative processes in complex settings, while attending to pressing ethical concerns. With this research, we contribute to advance theoretically the debate about digital transformation and leadership, offering an extensive and systematic review, and identifying key future research opportunities to advance knowledge in this field.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- Despite the urgency felt by scholars to understand how leaders keep the pace with technological change, the literature seems to lack a shared approach in studying and theorizing about this phenomenon. Although researchers have been introducing relevant new concepts, such as e-leader and e-organizations, there is a shortage of well-established and consensual definitions in the literature. The study’s review reveals scholars have relied on several leadership theories to explain the relationship between leadership and digital transformation. However, we question whether theories based on traditional views of industrial organization and business, that still prevail in the literature, are the most suitable to comprehend the multifaceted phenomenon of digital transformation and its impact on all matters leadership of organizations, communities, teams, and even self. As suggested by Kahai et al. (2013), scholars may need to go beyond traditional leadership theories to explain the impact digitalization exerts on leadership and leaders. Are the existing theories in social sciences able to explain the antecedents, characteristics and outcomes of this disruptive phenomenon or do we need new theoretical lenses to make sense of how leaders may respond to this change?
- One of the most complex and pressing issues concerns e-leaders (un)ethical behaviors. Notably, the higher risk leaders now face of engaging in unethical uses of personal and sensitive information, or the inexistence of a code of conduct for ethical leadership behavior are critical concerns to raise in any debate of e-leadership (Lee, 2009). Collaboration through digital technologies brings about new questions regarding the role leaders may play in the digital environment. What is the role of leaders in guiding an ethical appropriation of digital technologies? What can e-leaders do in order to be an example and instill an ethical culture within their followers? How do digital tools such as social media and online communities and forums change the conditions under which interactions occur and how do these affect the maintenance of ethical behaviors? These are questions that future research is pressed to answer. While the theoretical debate has already started to address some of these questions, empirical research remains considerably underdeveloped.
- The present review uncovers a shortage of contributions addressing the role that institutions play in supporting ethical behaviors of leaders. In particular, what remains unclear is whether and how leaders will be prepared to face the new wave of data and policies that affect their ability to manage privacy and regulatory issues. Studies in this area are thus highly encouraged.
- The leader-follower relationships mediated by ICTs can also be affected by concerns for privacy and information that the parties do not want to share. Social media interactions, for example, leave digital footprints that can be monitored by leaders and organizations, which may compromise the interactions and responses of followers that feel their privacy is at risk. The same can be said regarding the instruments that digital technologies provide for tracing personal productivity. Project management applications, for instance, trace individual contributions to a certain project, but can challenge an impartial evaluation if the relationship between individual effort and contribution to the results is not clear, thus putting into question the trust in the relationship with leaders. Future research should consider these aspects and work toward a broader comprehension of how to balance the need for higher transparency in ICT- mediated relationships with followers’ higher autonomy and need for privacy.
- We acknowledge that the introduction and use of digital tools it strictly linked to organizational cultures that value the use of technology and establishes the readiness of organizations to successfully implement digital tools. Therefore, we suggest further research needs to investigate the extent to which culture affects the selection and effective implementation of digital technologies within organizations. Answering to this question also provides relevant information on how digital technology alters organizational identity and shapes new organizational boundaries. Exploring this line of inquiry using both theoretical and empirical approaches, may inform the creation of new organizational identities, and their relationship with different types of organizations and institutions.
- Since digitalization is enabling a growing propensity to share information, organizational boundaries are becoming more fluid and expanding outside the formal organization. Hence, collective forms of leadership are expected to increase. Notably, distributed or shared leadership is supposed to gain momentum, especially if it is considered a better fit to the characteristics of virtual teams, such as the informal nature of its communication channels, task interdependence and team member autonomy (Avolio et al., 2014; Hoch and Kozlowski, 2014). What remains unclear is the role that leaders play in recognizing and encouraging distributed leadership in teams. Moreover, how much does the success of shared leadership styles depend on the organizational culture? What is the effect of shared leadership on virtual team dynamics? We claim that these are questions that should be explored with greater detail in the future.
- Networked organizations, as well as the rise of virtual teams, speak volumes about the endless connectivity possibilities that digital technology has enabled. However, empirical studies on virtual teams also highlight that digital tools and media can disconnect individuals and undermine established power dynamics. Despite the relevance of increased connectivity, only a few studies adopt a network approach to understand how leaders and followers are interconnected to one another.
- Literature has already acknowledged that the lack of face-to-face interactions makes the task of leading virtual teams a more complex job (Purvanova and Bono, 2009). Indeed, the physical and cultural distance that characterizes virtual teams threatens the ability to build trust, create commitment and enhance cohesion among team members (Hoch and Kozlowski, 2014. As suggested by Lee (2009) trust in virtual teams is related to ethics: the way in which leaders and team members behave, the extent to which they demonstrate transparency when interacting with others, the integrity and compliance to the rules and procedures of the organization and the team are key issues that should not be neglected. However, little is known about the methods and behaviors that effective leaders can adopt in order to build trust in virtual teams. Literature on this topic needs contributions that focus specifically on the process of trust creation in virtual teams, describing its characteristics and mechanisms and informing about which digital tools can be used to support such process. Indeed, along with the ability of creating trust among team members, virtual team leaders are required to have the ability of choosing and exploiting the right communication tools (Jawadi et al., 2013; Roman et al., 2018). Future research should try to uncover the effect different characteristics of communication tools may have on team dynamics and leader-followers relationships.
- The lack of face-to-face interaction also creates new challenges in the deployment of social skills. Processes related to interpersonal understanding may be inhibited by distance and by the use of interfaces. Indeed, comparing traditional face-to-face teams and pure virtual teams, Balthazard et al. (2009) found that leader characteristics that are easier to perceive from nonverbal cues, such as personality traits, predicted the emergence of transformational leadership in face-to-face teams, but not in computer-mediated teams. Considering the importance of social understanding and affect-based perceptions, we encourage future research that analyzes the ways in which leaders can create positive emotional contagion, through technology.
- For example, it could be interesting to inquire whether the use of facial/emotional recognition devices (Pentland and Choudhury, 2000), and affective haptics (Arafsha et al., 2012) can contribute to interpersonal emotional understanding and sharing, and how it affects leader-follower relationships and team dynamics. Balthazard et al. (2009) found written communication quality to be positively related to the emergence of transformational leadership in virtual teams. Indeed, the increasing adoption of written communication-based tools such as chats, social media, or document sharing platforms, calls for the use of linguistic analysis of online communication to understand how leaders effectively instill emotions, convey their vision, or communicate urgency through text.
- As suggested by Avolio et al. (2014), leadership in the digital world may be influenced by gender. Men and women may adopt different criteria in choosing which technologies to adopt. However, this topic of research has earned little attention in the literature. We claim that other studies are needed to investigate more in depth gender differences, and its effect on organizational outcomes.
- Another topic that future researcher needs to address regards the way in which leaders can develop the skills needed to perform in the digital era. Some scholars maintain virtual games might be useful instruments to foster both social and technical skills (Ducheneaut and Moore, 2005; Lu et al., 2014). However, findings have not yet showed whether virtual games have a clear effect on social and digital skills development. Researchers suggest future research could inspect what types of virtual behaviors foster team engagement and higher team performance in multiplayer virtual games, while examining the role of these variables in organizational settings. Other scholars propose digital natives and technical experts in organizations may be engaged in the training of those who are less familiar with or demonstrate a negative attitude toward the adoption of technology, for example by means of reverse mentoring programs (Coutu, 2000). However, conditions that can favor a successful digital transformation of organizations should be analyzed. The technological skill advantage of young generations may destabilize traditional power relations. A closer look to this phenomenon is suggested.
- In a digital world where physical presence is becoming unnecessary, the possibility that some leadership responsibilities begin to be performed by AI-based technology is not unrealistic. A tough debate is raising awareness as to whether robots can be programmed to express emotions and how this fosters the possibility that robots may be better leaders than humans (Avolio et al., 2014). Complementing the literature that has so far stressed the importance of emotions and emotional intelligence for leaders’ performance (see for instance Boyatzis, 2006; Boyatzis et al., 2017), future research should shed light on whether and how robots, algorithms and technological tools substitute or complement leaders.
- Even if macro and micro level of analysis are explored by social science scholars, management literature would still lack the analysis of the phenomenon of leadership and digitalization at the meso-level. A promising way of combining micro and macro levels of theorizing might be to introduce a multiple level of analysis. Some of the papers in our dataset move toward this direction, however, it is not clear how digitalization is affecting relationships between diverse organizations.
- Finally, from a methodological point of view, the study shows a plethora of methods employed by scholars to analyze leaders’ behavior (Hambley et al., 2007; Malhotra et al., 2007; Jawadi et al., 2013), leaders’ skills (Horner-Long and Schoenberg, 2002; Roman et al., 2018), or technology adoption (Bartol and Liu, 2002; Weiner et al., 2015). If on one hand, this richness provides a portfolio of techniques that scholars could use depending on the subject of analysis, on the other hand, it confirms that there is still a confusion about how to monitor this recent phenomenon. Moreover, we observe that contributions are confined within their own disciplinary frontiers. For instance, social movements literature, that mainly draws on qualitative methods such as ethnography, case study, and interviews, should inform organizational scholars how to observe power relations within companies. Extant contributions investigating what are the skills leaders facing the digital transformation require are based mainly on experts’ surveys and interviews. Literature reveals a lack of empirical research which examines the relationship between identified leadership skills and successful performance in highly digitalized organizations. Future studies should also take into account how much this relationship may be affected by the context in which the leader operates.