“Mind the Leadership Gap!”

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has acted as a catalyst for organisational change, disrupting historic ways of working, and spearheading organisations towards the next evolution of their working environments. In the aftermath of the largest concurrent work from home experiment in the world, organisations are coming to grips with the new policies and practices they need to implement to remain competitive. But there is one crucial stakeholder who continues to be left out in academic research, leaders. New questions now arise as to how we should remodel leadership in an increasingly remote world. What skills do leaders need to develop and how, in order to maintain employee wellbeing and manage the intergenerational divide? This paper presents a short synthesis of the challenges faced by leaders today specifically around remote team management but also in the context of a multigenerational workforce, alongside a summary of the research gaps we face in post-COVID literature. This paper concludes with the production of a future research agenda for scholars to close this gap, and to help organisations in building their leadership capability in the ‘new normal’.

Re-visiting the Leadership Gap

“…It is evident from the research presented thus far that the transition towards task-focused work systems, and the gig economy, raise a new dynamic to the leadership gaps we discussed in our previous paper (Murphy and Turnbull, 2023). New questions now arise to further the future research agenda, such as:…”

“…However, scholars have found that increasing a leader's effort to convey emotion often results in a reduced inclination to do so, thus transitioning the employee and leader relationship to a transactional state (Silard et al, 2022). This raises new concerns, since our previous paper in this journal confirmed that younger generations, such as millennials, now seek more personal, one-to-one relationships with their leaders, and reject older transactional forms of leadership (Murphy and Turnbull, 2023). Thus, to counteract the impact of feelings of organisational belonging in a task-focused work environment, it is clear that leaders will need to enhance their humanistic skills, such as their self-awareness, empathy, communication, and listening (Allen et al, 2021).…”

“…In our previous paper (Murphy and Turnbull, 2023), we called for the need to revisit leadership theory in a post-pandemic world. Specifically, we discussed the new challenges faced by leaders caused by the remote working dynamic, and the changing generational demographics in the workplace, which combine to bring new needs and expectations to the leadership role.…”