Leadership Characteristics in the Era of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation provoked by Industry 4.0 should not be just seen as a technological issue, it causes also fundamental changes in processes and in organizations of companies. Notably a new understanding of leadership can be counted on to them. The so-called “digital leaders” are expected to act rapidly and flexible in networked and distributed organization structures on the one hand and on the other hand they have to manage the digital transformation of the organization. Since most of the companies are still in the beginning of their digital transformation, there is a lack of a common understanding and a standard model of digital leadership. Most of the existing research works are visionary and predict the requirements for digital leadership on anticipated technological, economical and organizational changes; only few of them report about changes in leadership based on implemented cases. The objective of this study is to sum up main characteristics of the leadership in the era of digital transformation by applying content analysis of literature review as the method.