Adaptive Digital Leadership Approaches for Self-engagement to Overcome Digital Transformation Gaps

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.34190/ecmlg.20.1.2943

Keywords:

Digital Leadership,, Digital Strategy,, Digital Transformation Gaps,, Business Model Gap,, Self-engagement

Abstract

Digital transformation, forced by a rapidly changing environment and the increasing speed of technological advancements, enables various valuable opportunities in the business context, like increased efficiency, lower costs, and thus enhanced competitiveness, and manifold, complex challenges, like fast-changing customer expectations, increasing job demands, new value creation structures, and disruptive competition from outside the traditional industry boundaries. This often leads to business process reengineering and urges the strategic realignment of management and leadership styles based on competitive positions and corporate goals. In digital transformation, value impedance defines resistances encountered when integrating new digital technologies and processes into existing systems and workflows. Similarly, digital transformation gaps such as the business model gap are discrepancies preventing organizations from fully exploiting benefits and overcoming the challenges of digital transformation. The connection of digital transformation gaps and value impedance is recommended to avoid conflicts when facing digital transformation. However, as many organizations face difficulties with that alignment, this paper introduces the topic of digital transformation gaps, specifically the business model gap, and discusses its bridging with digital leadership aspects regarding self-engagement. Self-engagement enhances employee motivation, innovative work behaviors, performance, and a positive attitude toward change. This research thus answers the following research question: what digital leadership factors contribute to the development of self-engagement of employees in organizations to bridge the business model gap in digital transformation? This qualitative research is based on the Design Science Research method and elaborates four matrices with four strategic options each to enhance the self-engagement of employees, based on validated questionnaire items from the existing literature, and iteratively evaluated and further developed through semi-structured interviews with domain experts. Consequently, these four matrices build the basis for bridges to overcome the business model gap in digital transformation. Further research is suggested, on the one hand, to validate the proposed strategic options quantitatively and, on the other hand, to extend the approach with more strategic options also for other focus areas.

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Published

2024-11-13