Digital Leadership

Digitalization has fostered virtual organizations, and nothing has made that clearer than the shutdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic. There have been structural changes in how leaders interact with followers and vice versa. This has changed the power dynamics between followers and leaders. This resource will introduce you to how the leader and follower roles can change situationally and examines approaches to leader-followership in the digital age.

9. A conceptual framework for the digital leader-followership

9.1 Application of LFT model for digital leader-followership

As mentioned in "The Context of the Digital Era," emerging digital leadership differs from traditional hierarchical leadership in many areas such as socio-cultural, theoretical, philosophical, and generational. The disruptive and unpredicted nature of the digital leadership seems to cause an on-going change and discontinuity among leading and following functional patterns in today's organizations who are in a transition from industrial to information and digital age.

The LFT approach may well serve as a bridge model between the traditional and emerging leadership paradigms in the digital age. For instance, by fostering leader-follower competences and wiliness to trade leading and following roles between digital immigrant and digital native generations, the existing L-M gap may be bridged. Examples of bridge building:

Salkowitz offers to close the digital gap and build intergenerational bridges by empowering the younger generation to educate older workers in information technology.
Chaudhuri and Ghosh recommend reverse mentoring programs for Boomer and Millennial generations to keep the former engaged and the latter committed.
To bridge the gap between generations, Kornelsen suggests leading with Millennials in a VUCA-world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous).