Digitalization and leadership – How experienced leaders interpret daily realities in a digital world

Abstract

Digitalization brings about great challenges for leaders of business organizations who now have to deal with disruptive changes on the commercial landscape, with data-driven decision making, as well as with new ways of crowd-based working; and with a workforce with ubiquitous access to information and establishing new ways of communication. In this paper, I examine leaders’ perspectives on these digitalization-driven developments. Employing a grounded theory approach, I analyzed data from qualitative interviews of 29 experienced business leaders and several observations. Leaders, as a unit of analysis, discuss environmental changes of leadership as well as updated practices of leaders’ communication with their followers. In addition, leaders self-report context-transcendence of their individual leadership styles. The insights contribute to a more integrative view of the interplay of digitalization and leadership and to the debate on whether the assumptions of leadership theories of the non-internet era are still valid.