The “Way” Toward E-leadership: Some Evidence From the Field

Abstract

Recently, leadership literature has faced the challenge of dealing with a growing pervasive diffusion of information and communication technologies that are deeply changing relationships among workers. Consequently, leadership is continuing to develop through the support of these technologies. This emerging phenomenon has been labeled e-leadership, and it has been studied with the objective of understanding the differences it exhibits from traditional leadership. Our research seeks to examine whether enterprises, which use leadership as an important “tool” to manage workers as effectively as possible, are conscious of this evolution, whether their behavior is supportive of the related needs, and how they are organizing themselves to face the problems and opportunities arising in this new context. The present study involved 15 Italian companies. Through in-depth interviews based on face-to-face meetings using a semi-structured questionnaire with enterprises’ representatives, we explored the extent of these changes. We developed the analysis across two points in time in order to verify if a change was observable with regard to the way these enterprises considered and managed e-leadership. It was also possible to enhance the role of the technologies themselves in leadership, which in the same period has seen a rapid evolution toward mobile and social developments. Our results help to illuminate that, on the one hand, awareness with regard to e-leadership has increased and, on the other hand, the pervasiveness of technologies is playing a relevant role in the change of leadership together with renewed attention toward soft competencies. We identify four different typologies of e-leadership, which summarize different ways of conceptualizing it, and indicate their main features. We should add that this topic is becoming extremely relevant because of the critical crises organizations are now facing (such as the COVID-19 emergency we are experiencing at the present time) and the urgency of adopting e-instruments, which seem now to be the main path to managing the present situation and the aftermath it inevitably will have. Despite this research being carried out before such an event has happened, we believe that its results may further enrich the current lively debate.

Learning to Lead from a Distance: Reflexive Learning during a Pandemic

“…A large stream of research has used experimental methods to answer hypotheses about how leaders have adapted to the forced remote work induced by the pandemic [36,37]. Another stream has used quantitative methods to investigate leadership approaches and behaviors [38,39].…”

Revisión sistemática de estudios empíricos en el liderazgo electrónico

“…El tópico sobre el constructo va orientado a la necesidad que reportan los investigadores en estudiar los conceptos semejantes al liderazgo electrónico, los elementos y las competencias, a través de estudios empíricos, en diferentes tipos de organizaciones y aplicando un diseño no solamente transversal sino longitudinal (Braun et al, 2019;Elkhouly et al, 2014;Meghana & Vijaya, 2019;Torre & Sarti, 2020;Twum-Darko, 2020). Adicional a esto, se enfoca en aplicar en los estudios empíricos de investigación mixta para corroborar hallazgos anteriores (Li et al, 2016;Liu et al, 2018).…”

Sustainable Virtual Teams: Promoting Well-Being through Affect Management Training and Openness to Experience Configurations

“…Another resource that can also be studied, as noted in prior research (e.g., [6,8,15,32,123]), is the role played by leaders in virtual teams. Leaders can help set clear team directions and build a supportive team climate [6].…”

“…Many of these teams have now become virtual and moved to telecommuting or virtual teamwork, making it possible for employees to work without temporal or geographical boundaries [5,6]. The virtualization of organizational teams took place, initially, because of the broad generalization of information and communication technologies [5,7,8] and, more recently, due to the disruptive digitalization caused by the COVID-19 pandemic [8,9]. In this regard, virtual teams are defined as groups of geographically dispersed members who interact through computer-mediated communication to pursue common goals [10,11] regardless of physical distance, time zones, or other barriers [6].…”

“…However, affect is difficult to show and manage in computer-mediated communication settings [46,47], and there could be a lack of appropriate skills within this context [34]. Different strategies can be used to improve the interactions and well-being of students and workers in virtual environments, for example, management of leadership [6,8,15], ideals [2], or experiential classes and training [12,34,48]). In the context of virtual settings, training is a particularly useful way to provide skills that improve the resources-demands imbalance [34].…”