Rethinking Leadership and Its Practices in the Digital Era

Digitalization causes disruptive changes in leadership practices. Understanding digitalization is thus important yet our review of the literature shows that: (1) the science and practice of leadership are still immature and need more research; and (2) the current driving force of changes in leadership is the long-time neglected contextual factor. In our paper, we aim to tackle both, theoretical and practical needs in leadership research. The theoretical part of our paper starts with a review of leadership literature. The old ways of leading people will not work in the creative economy where the competitive advantage of organizations is founded on learning, creativity, and innovation. We introduce an emerging leadership paradigm where trust, collaborative learning, co-creation, sharing and communicating in networks, connecting people dominate rather than commanding and controlling. The empirical part of our paper is exploratory where we seek to identify the implications of digitalization by answering two questions: How is digitalization changing current and future leadership practices? Who are the digileaders? We rely on the findings of a qualitative survey that targets middle managers as active business practitioners in Finland. Our survey focuses on two areas: (1) the current and future leadership tasks and practices of middle managers; and (2) the competencies and qualifications of digileaders. We also aim at identifying those leadership tasks that could be digitalized in the future. We discuss the overall impact of digitalization on leadership practices.