Leadership Research Summary:
- Recently, leadership literature has faced the challenge of dealing with a growing pervasive diffusion of information and communication technologies that are deeply changing relationships among workers. Consequently, leadership is continuing to develop through the support of these technologies. This emerging phenomenon has been labeled e-leadership, and it has been studied with the objective of understanding the differences it exhibits from traditional leadership. The research study seeks to examine whether enterprises, which use leadership as an important “tool” to manage workers as effectively as possible, are conscious of this evolution, whether their behavior is supportive of the related needs, and how they are organizing themselves to face the problems and opportunities arising in this new context. The present study involved 15 Italian companies.
- Through in-depth interviews based on face-to-face meetings using a semi-structured questionnaire with enterprises’ representatives, we explored the extent of these changes. The study developed the analysis across two points in time in order to verify if a change was observable with regard to the way these enterprises considered and managed e-leadership. It was also possible to enhance the role of the technologies themselves in leadership, which in the same period has seen a rapid evolution toward mobile and social developments. The results help to illuminate that, on the one hand, awareness with regard to e-leadership has increased and, on the other hand, the pervasiveness of technologies is playing a relevant role in the change of leadership together with renewed attention toward soft competencies.
- The study identifies four different typologies of e-leadership, which summarize different ways of conceptualizing it, and indicate their main features. Researchers add that this topic is becoming extremely relevant because of the critical crises organizations are now facing (such as the COVID-19 emergency we are experiencing at the present time) and the urgency of adopting e-instruments, which seem now to be the main path to managing the present situation and the aftermath it inevitably will have. Despite this research being carried out before such an event has happened, researchers believe that its results may further enrich the current lively debate.
Leadership Research Implications and Findings:
- According to the descriptions we obtained during our interviews, the main features of the emerging e-leadership can be summarized in terms of the following five points. In other words, e-leadership is exemplified by:
- The comprehension of the opportunities offered by icts (and not a deep technical expertise) as the basis of an e-leader’s professionalism, so that the UTAUT variable of social influence is reinforced;
- The aptitude toward communication and interpersonal relationships remaining essential, thereby confirming what Van Wart et al. (2019) have suggested: both these dimensions have to be managed in more difficult conditions to avoid the risk of ineffectiveness in comparison with their expression in traditional leadership;
- The orientation toward change, which allows the e-leader to promote a different culture that is accepted easily by digital natives but with more difficulty by the other generations of workers, to whom an innovative and ad hoc approach must be proffered;
- The capability to take on risks and to decide quickly, in a fast-moving context;
- The acceptance of a different way of establishing his/her role as a more constitutive skill; this means that the role of the leader is “conquered on the field” in accordance with the demonstrated ability to manage, and it is always less related to the formal position held in the hierarchical line.
- In the ideal scenario, a leader is more of a “facilitator” than a “guide,” more of a manager with a different equilibrium—one who is able to effectively blend resources and behaviors—than simply an “attractive boss.” Similarly, team members are less like disciples and more like collaborators. Accordingly, the role of the leader exhibits a change due to the presence of more interactive technologies, the characteristics of which act so deeply on the nature of leadership itself. However, this change is also highly firm specific, embedded within that cultural background and those organizational choices that could help or hamper it. In this perspective, a specific role is played by the UTAUT facilitating conditions, which successfully summarize the organization dimension in the e-leadership process.