The Role of Leadership in a Digitalized World

We collected papers from the Scopus database, one of the most widely used sources of scientific literature. We also checked Web of Science and Ebsco databases in order to avoid missing articles. Because we did not find any relevant distinction between these databases regarding this topic, we chose to use Scopus only. We firstly accessed the database on September 1st, 2018.

Since our research questions concerned the academic discussion on digital transformation and leadership, the scope of our search was limited to academic articles (not only from peer-reviewed journals but also from unpublished sources, such as unpublished manuscripts). Non-academic books and other publications were outside the scope of our study and were therefore excluded from our search. Our initial search was undertaken using the basic keywords: leader^* AND digital^* OR e-leader^*. The keywords were used as a selection criterion for the topic (title, keywords, or abstract). We searched peer-reviewed papers published in English, in journals focusing on the following subject areas: Business, Management, and Accounting; Psychology; and Social Science, without any additional selection restrictions. We decided to scan articles published in other areas than Business and Management since the topic is covered by several disciplines. These criteria resulted in an initial sample of 790 articles. The following figure (Figure 1) shows how the debate grew since 2000, and significantly expanded since 2015.

In order to avoid a potential publication bias, and to scan recent studies that might not have had the time to go through the entire publication process, we performed a search within conference proceedings since 2015, using the same aforementioned criteria. The initial sample comprised 113 articles.

The second step within our data collection process involved a qualitative selection of articles. We first considered publications with at least one citation among those published before 2013, seen that the number of citations is a common criterion of scientific rigor and impact in academia. As citation-based methods may discriminate against recent publications, we kept all papers published after 2013. Based on the assumption that top journals publish high quality papers, we discarded studies that were not included within the first 200 journals appearing in the Scimago list within the Management and Business, Social Science, and Psychology areas. Then, both peer-reviewed articles and conference proceedings were filtered based on the assessment of whether the abstracts were in alignment with the topic and the boundary conditions. Articles were selected based on the following criteria: (i) the leader was a person who guides a group, organization, or empowers their transformational processes; (ii) there was a clear reference to digital or technological transformation; (iii) there was a clear link between information technology and leadership. Articles that focused on either digital transformation or leadership only were excluded, as well as papers that were outside our boundary conditions, such as studies on industry leaders using digital platforms. Figure 2 summarizes the selection criteria and the boundary conditions used to scan the articles. The search criteria resulted in a final dataset of 54 studies.