Leadership in the Era of Digital Transformation: The Digital Leadership Approaches

The digital era has heralded changes in the business environment that consequently transformed the understanding of leadership because technological advancement and digitalization place extra demands on organizational leaders. In exploring the concept of leadership in the digital age, this study employed an integrative literature review method. The article establishes that successful digital leadership depends on the transformational leadership approach. Successful digital leadership is contingent on the leader’s ability to inspire, motivate, build relationships, collaborate, generate ideas, and model requisite behaviours toward the attainment of organization goals. The findings from this review indicate that digital leadership is crucial to the outcomes of an organization such as innovation, problem-solving, digital transformation, organizational performance, growth, and sustainability. At the same time, the effectiveness of digital leadership depends on the success of digital transformation, innovation, organizational performance, and growth. Achieving effective digital leadership necessitates that leaders employ a combination of approaches, which this article described under the concept of the digital leadership system. This article proposes the digital leadership system (DLS) which encompasses the ideas that successfully leading digital enterprises, digital transformation, and digital or technological innovations require a future-oriented approach and timely positioning of the business, navigating self and people, tracking performance, and mapping data, and driving growth and innovation to achieve the three-dimensional sustainability outcomes. The article highlights the critical expectations for leadership under each approach and broadened the knowledge about leadership in the digital era by presenting the definitions of digital leadership. In addition, valuable ideas are discussed for supporting successful real-world practice of digital leadership and areas of further research useful in advancing knowledge about digital leadership are outlined.