Shared digital leadership in government: a roles and competencies study

Digital leadership capabilities and associated clusters of competencies form a foundation for digital transformation in the public sector. This increasingly depends on leadership contributions and strategy-matching competencies shared across organisational levels and professional roles. Drawing on shared leadership theory, we analysed how public sector employees at different organisational levels contribute to digital leadership. The study uses a qualitative research design with independent sources of evidence: document analysis of job descriptions and semi-structured interviews with digital leadership professionals. We mapped the theory-informed competencies to the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), an industry-recognised competencies framework. We find that digital leadership competencies and contributions should be understood as a shared leadership construct requiring multiple contributions across multiple levels. We offer an illustrative example of our shared digital leadership conceptualisation in practice, using a horizontal and vertical slice of the roles involved in cyber security risk management as the context.