Leadership in a Digitalized Stationary Food Retail Environment

Due to the increased application of different omnichannel approaches, lots of brick-and-mortar stores implement technology and digitalize their in-store operations. Although employees and work environments are strongly influenced by these changes, only a few studies have dealt with the topic of leadership in this context. This paper aims to investigate the role of food retailing managers in times of digital change. By doing so, we identify leadership styles suitable for such situations. Drawing on transactional and transformational leadership approaches in digital settings, the study takes a qualitative approach based on eleven interviews with food retail managers. We show that leadership styles propagated in the literature in connection with digitalization are not necessarily transferable to food retailing. Digitalization offers the opportunity to simplify information-sharing and reduce workload for employees and managers. All those involved must be “taken along”. This sometimes proves difficult in practice, as both employees and managers do not always have an affinity for digital technologies or cannot communicate them well. Findings suggest a strong involvement of employees in digital transformation processes through simple and personal communication which also considers individual needs.