Digital leadership

What is leadership and what is special about it in the digital age?

Andy Weeger

Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences

February 14, 2024

Introduction

Digital leader empower people with vision, understanding, clarity and agility. Waltraud Glaeser, Leadership Coach

Definitions

From leadership
to the digital age
to digital leadership

Dicussion

What is leadership?

Quote

A leader. . .is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind. Nelson Mandela

Leadership

A leader is “is one or more people who selects, equips, trains, and influences one or more follower(s) who have diverse gifts, abilities, and skills and focuses the follower(s) to the organization’s mission and objectives causing the follower(s) to willingly and enthusiastically expend spiritual, emotional, and physical energy in a concerted coordinated effort to achieve the organizational mission and objectives.” (Winston and Patterson 2006, 8).

Management is about coping with complexity, leadership is about coping with change (Kotter 2017)

Dicussion

What is the digital age?

Context of leadership

The digital age is coined by digital technologies (e.g., social media, mobile computing, analytics/big data, cloud computing — SMAC) that are inherently disruptive and that cause major changes (Karimi and Walter 2015).

Verhoef et al. (2021) identifies three phases of digital transformation:
digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation.

  • Digitization is the “the process of converting analog signals into a digital form, and ultimately into binary digits (bits)” (Tilson, Lyytinen, and Sørensen 2010, 749).
  • Digitalization is “a sociotechnical process of applying digitizing techniques to broader social and institutional contexts” (Tilson, Lyytinen, and Sørensen 2010, 749).
  • Digital transformation is “a process that aims to improve an entity by triggering significant changes to its properties through combinations of information, computing, communication, and connectivity technologies” (Vial 2019, 118).

Dicussion

What are specifics of the digital age that require distinct leadership skills?

Disruptive potential

Digital technologies do not develop linearly, but exponentially, which is leading to significant changes in peoples behavior, attitudes, and expectations.

Acceleration of VUCA

Volatility
Uncertainty
Complexity
& Ambiguity

Digital leadership

Digital technology has changed and is changing organizations’ structure, work environment, processes and culture, in an irreversible way, creating new challenges that leaders have to face.

Organizational leaders must work to ensure that their organizations is capable of responding to the disruptions associated with the use of digital technologies and of responding to the changes (Vial 2019), e.g., by

  • dissolving inertia and resistance to change,
  • leading employees to assume roles that were traditionally outside of their functions,
  • acting as boundary spanners that foster close collaboration between business and IT functions,
  • depending on analytical skills to solve increasingly complex business problems,
  • ensuring that digital technologies are properly leveraged (i.e., used).

Digital leaders empower people with vision, understanding, clarity and agility.

Q&A

Homework

Read Judge et al. (2002) and answer following questions:

  • What are the most salient aspects of personality as proposed by the five-factor model of personality (i.e., Big Five traits)?
  • How are these traits found to relate to leadership?
  • What surprised you most?

Literature

Judge, Timothy A, Joyce E Bono, Remus Ilies, and Megan W Gerhardt. 2002. “Personality and Leadership: A Qualitative and Quantitative Review.” Journal of Applied Psychology 87 (4): 765.
Karimi, Jahangir, and Zhiping Walter. 2015. “The Role of Dynamic Capabilities in Responding to Digital Disruption: A Factor-Based Study of the Newspaper Industry.” Journal of Management Information Systems 32 (1): 39–81.
Kotter, John P. 2017. “What Leaders Really Do.” In Leadership Perspectives, 7–15. Routledge.
Schreckling, Edward, and Christoph Steiger. 2017. “Digitalize or Drown.” Shaping the Digital Enterprise: Trends and Use Cases in Digital Innovation and Transformation, 3–27.
Sullivan, John. 2012. “VUCA: The New Normal for Talent Management and Workforce Planning.” Ere. Net 16.
Tilson, David, Kalle Lyytinen, and Carsten Sørensen. 2010. “Research Commentary—Digital Infrastructures: The Missing IS Research Agenda.” Information Systems Research 21 (4): 748–59.
Verhoef, Peter C, Thijs Broekhuizen, Yakov Bart, Abhi Bhattacharya, John Qi Dong, Nicolai Fabian, and Michael Haenlein. 2021. “Digital Transformation: A Multidisciplinary Reflection and Research Agenda.” Journal of Business Research 122: 889–901.
Vial, Gregory. 2019. “Understanding Digital Transformation: A Review and a Research Agenda.” The Journal of Strategic Information Systems 28 (2): 118–44.
“VUCA: The New Reality.” n.d. QRM Institute. https://qrminstitute.org/vuca-the-new-reality.
Winston, Bruce E, and Kathleen Patterson. 2006. “An Integrative Definition of Leadership.” International Journal of Leadership Studies 1 (2): 6–66.

Footnotes

  1. Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years

  2. Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system