The Challenge of Leadership Development in the Digital Era

Introduction

Leadership is such an important factor for the success of today’s organizations. The classic theories of organization have placed a greater emphasis on the design of organizational structure based on the belief that establishing one-fits-all approach can ensure the optimal productivity of an organization. According to these theories, the role of managers was mainly to implement the bureaucratic rules, formal regulations, and standardized procedures (Zaleznik, 1977). However, as the rate of changes in societal and market environment increases, timely organizational responses to the rapidly changing demands of various stakeholders has become a keyword for their survival and prosperity (Suarez & Oliva, 2005). In this context, the role of those occupying leadership positions to create the momentum for organizational change and adjustment to meet the environmental demands is increasing emphasized (Johnson, 1998). It seems clear that organizations need leaders who can better mobilize their employees to achieve greater performance than just making sure their employees are fulfilling their routine tasks.

The concept of leadership involves a type of interpersonal interaction in which one person affect behaviors of others. A conceptual clarification is in order because there are some concepts similar to leadership in social science literature. One of which is the concept of management. Management also involves interpersonal influence. Managers determine what their subordinates should do and the subordinates follow the instructions from managers. The concept of management is predicated on the existence of organizational context in which hierarchical authority characterizes relationship among employees. In essence, manager’s activity of influencing subordinate’s behavior take place in the situation in which it is subordinate’s formal responsibility to do so (Kerr & Jeremier, 1978). In contrast, leadership tend to focus on the ability of leaders inducing employees to make voluntary efforts to achieve tasks goals sometimes going beyond formal responsibility. The distinction between management and leadership is reflected in a line of current leadership studies. For instance, effective leadership is found to increase organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) indicating that people can do more work than they are required when they are inspired by an effective leadership (Bambale, Shamdusin, & Subramaniam, 2011; Dartey-Baak & Addo, 2018).

Another scholarly concepts similar to leadership is power. Power also refers to the situation where a person makes others to do what he/she wants. However, power is a broader term than leadership in that power can be exerted through coercive measure, whereas leadership tend to emphasize follower’s voluntary compliance. This distinction is well shown in the notion of transformational leadership. Bass (1990) proposed a taxonomy of leadership by which he introduced a new concept of transformational leadership, positioning it in juxtaposition with a more traditional notion of transactional leadership. He goes on to argue that transformational leadership is more effective in that it enables to achieve extraordinary performance beyond expectation by transforming the follower’ motivation tendency such that they voluntarily internalize the goals of leader or organization.