Status: completed
Description
Although many companies have undertaken initiatives to drive digital transformation, their success rate is lower than one-third (McKinsey & Company, 2018). Research points out that one key to transformation success is leadership (Kane et al., 2019). However, it is a demanding task for leaders to fulfill this role because the powerful and disruptive changes associated with an organization’s digital transformation make leadership much more complex and results in different leadership challenges (Bolden & O’Regan, 2016). To successfully overcome these challenges, researchers suggest that leaders need a behavioral complexity in order to show different, partly competing leadership roles (Lawrence et al., 2009). For instance, the digital era requires that leaders develop and implement digital strategies to enhance organizational performance and remain competitive (Tabrizi et al., 2019). Therefore, leaders have to deploy task-oriented leadership behaviors, particularly concerning digital transformation. Simultaneously, leaders are nowadays confronted with employees who might be over-challenged by disruptive technological and organizational developments. Hence, leaders need to identify, understand, and consider the individual needs and concerns as well as the strengths and weaknesses of their employees in order to provide appropriate support. Thus, people-oriented leadership behaviors are also important in the digital era.
Numerous studies have been conducted to explain employees’ responses to an organizational change (e.g., Wanberg & Banas, 2000). However, the impact of leaders on change has not been studied systematically (Oreg & Berson, 2019), particularly not in terms of an organization’s digital transformation. Little research exists on what specific behaviors leaders should display (Vos & Rupert, 2018) as well as how such behaviors and especially their combination influence employees in change situations like an organization’s digital transformation. Hence, the core purpose of this research project is to analyze the effectiveness of task-oriented, more precisely digital transformation-oriented leadership behavior, and people-oriented leadership behavior as well as the combination of both. Using an experimental scenario design, we investigate leaders’ impact on employees in terms of their affective, cognitive, and behavioral change responses.
Involved Persons
