More self-organization, more control—or even both? Inverse transparency as a digital leadership concept

Abstract

Digital innovations drive an organization’s digital transformation. While numerous studies focus on digital product and service innovation, digital process innovation and novel business models, management and leadership concepts are primarily investigated as enabling framing conditions in previous contributions. However, management and leadership concepts have changed dramatically in the digital era. The rise of digital technologies has led to companies acquiring large amounts of data. Moreover, novel technical solutions facilitate the analysis and processing of this data, leading to an increase in organizational transparency. Traditional leadership theories fail to explain the influence of digitalization and increasing transparency of leadership. In a digitized world, managers often face a trade-off when using data for management purposes. On the one hand, transparency leads to decreasing information asymmetries, allowing managers to monitor employees’ actions at low cost. On the other hand, employees demand self-organization and empowerment. In this context, new forms of control and employee engagement need to be designed. With our conceptual paper, we aim to provide a solution to the challenges of using transparency in leadership in a mutually beneficial way for managers and employees by introducing the concept of “inverse transparency.” We develop the concept building on the existing literature on transparency and leadership. We see inverse transparency as the basis for a new type of digital innovation, which we introduce as digital leadership innovation. Thus, we enhance current research on leadership approaches and digital innovation and create a theoretical basis for further research.

Digital Leadership and Employee Creativity: The Role of Employee Job Crafting and Person-Organization Fit

“…The past few years have witnessed growing academic interest in digital leadership (e.g., El Sawy et al, 2016 ; Larjovuori et al, 2016 ; Gierlich-Joas et al, 2020 ; Klein, 2020 ; Bresciani et al, 2021 ; Claassen et al, 2021 ; de Araujo et al, 2021 ), but few studies have focused on the relationship between digital leadership and employee creativity. Based on the job demands–resources model and person–organization fit theory, this study examines the relationship between digital leadership and employee creativity.…”

Identifying and Overcoming Future Challenges in Leadership: The Role of IS in Facilitating Empowerment

“…As recent studies in the field of control theory highlight, the novel degree of transparency in organizations can be used to either enable or track employees [25,37]. Thus, the thorough implementation of transparency is of high importance as it lays the foundation to prevent mistrust and enables ways of successful empowerment [16]. By examining the challenge of empowerment in an explorative way, we add to the literature on leadership in the digital age and control theory [1,24].…”

“…As for the technology-pull, there is a rising demand for empowerment, which creates a strong interest in LRIS supporting transparency and participation [16]. Once these novel digital solutions are applied in firms, they trigger a transformation on the business side [17].…”

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