Role of Leadership in Digital Transformation (Essay Sample)

Role of Leadership in Digital Transformation Student’s Name Course Professor’s Name Major Date Role of Leadership in Digital Transformation Introduction While the 21st century may have been punctuated with novel business trends, the most profound has been the rise of digital transformation. The term digital transformation is not a new term in the world of scholarly research, but a topic of extensive scholarly significance for the last few decades. At its core, digital transformation has widely been portrayed as the adoption of new technologies, standards and processes. This adoption fundamentally alters how the firm creates and captures value as well as how it delivers it to the customers. Although post-modern firms have shown commendable effort to realize digital transformation, they have been met with the challenge of providing the right balance between theoretical knowledge regarding digital technologies and the skills in their human capital. We propose that this is a question of leadership, and seek to define the role of democratic leadership style, one of the most popular leadership styles today, in the process of digital transformation. The paper is divided into four sections. The Problem Formulation part provides the scope and approach of our enquiry. The subsequent section is the Literature Review section and provides a seminal systematic review of pre-existing literature pertaining to the research questions. The conclusion and recommendation section provides the inferences as deducted from the systematic literature review as well as plausible recommendations to various stakeholder groups. Problem formulation The present research departs from a need to fill the gap in the knowledge regarding the role of democratic leadership in the process of digital transformation. Recent research by Gullap suggests that at least 36% of organizations in the USA adopt the democratic leadership style. This places the democratic leadership style among the most popular leadership styles in modern workplaces. Sadly, to the best of the knowledge of the researcher, there is a disturbing paucity in the literature that evaluates the effect of the democratic leadership style in processes of systemic reach such as digital transformation. Pre-existing attempts have mostly pursued a comparative approach with other leadership styles which in turn leads to fragmented and dispersed findings about the subject of research. In this regard, our research question is; “Is democratic leadership associated with higher rates of organizational success during digital transformation?” To successfully address this question, we curate our research process using the PICO approach. The PICO framework suggests that to completely understand a subject of research, the research question must be farmed in a way that is relevant to the population affected and in a way that allows the researcher to easily search for the correct response to the research question. PICO is mnemonic for the most important parts of an investigation which include the Population, the Intervention, the Comparison and the Outcome. In our present case, the Population includes modern organizations; the Intervention democratic leadership; the Comparison any other styles of leadership; and the Outcome, successful digital transformation. The research process involved collecting relevant sources and systematically reviewing them. The search was limited to electronic databases such as Google Scholar, Plos, Elsevier, Emerald, and CORE. These databases were selected on their account of their ability to facilitate easy access as well as being reputable repositories for free to use journals. Databases such as PLOS, Elsevier, and Emerald collaborate with esteemed publishers who uphold rigorous editorial and ethical guidelines. These publishers have gained a strong reputation within the academic world due to their long-standing presence and track record of generating dependable and authoritative literature. In addition, they have the capacity to index and consolidate a diverse array of scholarly publications originating from multiple publishers and periodicals. The extensive scope of this coverage enhances the probability of discovering pertinent and rigorously evaluated research across several academic fields. All articles selected for the review were not older than seven years to ensure that the study findings are time-sensitive, especially given the ever-changing nature of digital technologies. Also, only studies that had the keywords identified in the PICO and responded to the research question above were considered for systematic review. Theoretical framework Our analysis seeks to test the participative leadership theory. The participative leadership theory was developed by Rensis Likert in his seminal 1961 article, “New Patterns of Management”(Wang et al., 2022). In his theory, Likert (1961) argues that leaders can capture and harness value from human capital through engaging employees in matters of decision making. Some of the distinctive pillars of the theory include maximum inclusivity, information sharing, and proactive communication. The leader’s tolerance for inclusivity and the accommodation of ideas from across the board is the flagship characteristic of the participative leadership theory as it is aimed at reducing finger-pointing in case of poor results. It should also be noted that although the employees are allowed to contribute to the decision making process, the theory insists that final decisions be made by the leaders (Wang et al., 2022). Literature Review Digital transformation as a digital disruption and significance of leadership Digital transformation has many varying connotations in the world of research. Even then, some descriptions such as those provided by Skog et al (2018) continue to be cited widely in conceptualizing digital transformation. The authors suggest that digital transformation must be viewed as a digital disruption because it involves “rapidly unfolding processes through which digital innovation comes to fundamentally alter historically sustainable logics for value creation and capture by unbundling and recombining linkages among resources or generating new ones”. This point of view is further acknowledged by Roblek et. al (2021) who classify digital transformations under digital disruptions because of their ability to provide new challenges and opportunities to established companies as well as new comers in the industry. In response to these disruptive dynamics, incumbent and new firms are confronted to respond to these changes strategically. These may include anything from implementing changes that relate to a new digital business environment to translating strategy to practices or even renegotiating value (Hogberg and Willermark (2022). Organizations have the ability to utilize big data as a means to acquire valuable information pertaining to market trends, consumer behavior, and operational effectiveness. This facilitates the process of making well-informed judgments, optimizing operational procedures, and formulating focused marketing strategies. Among the key actors in implementing strategic responses to digital disruptions are leaders. Cortellazo et al. (2019) asserts the important role of leaders in realizing digital transformation, arguing that they are essential in creating relationships between the many “scattered stakeholders” and fostering focus by streamlining collaborative processes in complex settings while still ensuring that the process of change conforms to pressing ethical concerns. Democratic Leadership provides the strategic agility needed for digital transformation Leadership is known to have high appreciative influence in different organizational processes. Akparep et al (2019) agree with this observation after examining the relationship between the leadership style adopted in TumaKavi Development Association (TKDA), a social group that mainly operates in Northern Region of Ghana, and its performance. Study findings suggested that the democratic leadership style adopted by the organization has been a key driving force in its performance essentially because of its ability to collect and accommodate richly diverse viewpoints from different stakeholder groups during the process of decision making. Chang et al (2020) also agrees with the views of Akparep et. al (2019) and establish a positive causal association between strategic agility, defined as “the ability of an organization to continuously adjust strategic directions and thrive with innovative ways to create value” and responsible leadership. The authors establish that responsible leaders improve strategic agility by demonstrating the ability to be flexible and motivate collective commitment from multiple diverse stakeholder groups. Corroborating evidence from other studies have also applauded the democratic leadership style for setting organizations on a path of optimum performance. To illustrate, there is an overwhelming consensus in the literature that asserts of the ability of participative decision making, which is at the core of democratic leadership, to have a reducing effect on the intention to leave among employees (Fatah et al., 2022). The explanation for this correlation is that when employees are allowed to participate in decision making, they feel valued and recognized and in turn reduce their intention to leave (Fatah et al., 2022). What’s more, evidence from the literature also asserts of the importance of strategic leadership, which has been established as a function of participative decision making, in ensuring digital transformation. According to a recent study by Bounfour et al (2023), firms that were strategically agile during the pandemic had an upper hand in responding to disruptive changes that came as a consequence of the pandemic especially when they were already ahead in digital ...