LD7090 Leadership in a Digital Age Assignment Sample 2023

Introduction

The history of human civilization has always needed the leadership of someone, and about a particular leadership structure a system falls out with. The advancement of the digital age has altogether needed the leadership to be in a cyclical way in accordance with the management structure. The growth of the internet being ubiquitous and the rampant strategy evolving almost every year, the need for managers to be more digitally inclined is of utmost importance in business sectors which will be described in this report.

Section 1: Leadership & Self Analysis

1.1 Leadership Models and Theories in the Context of Digital Leadership

Trait Theory

Trait theory may be considered as one of the most important theories in the age of digital management, where the theory alone focuses on the trait of a successful manager. In the terms of anatomical science, a trait may be regarded as the stable characteristics of a human that repeats itself in a hereditical order. Traits if closely observed mostly focus on the humanistic approach to repeat a behaviour that has been lying dormant within the behaviour. Trait theory has been mostly used and theorised in the modern aspect in respect to the evaluation and understanding of the individual personality traits, identifying them with a better understanding of the characteristics that may be proven beneficial to the system of digital management. In addition, Gordon Allport’s Trait Theory, has been quite effective to bring in an innovation to the modular version of the trait theory, where the advancement has been brought in more clinically (Doremus, 2020).

Five Factors Trait Theory is also called Big Five Trait Theory, where the five categories have been mentioned as Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness which all are required in the digital era. In practice, the five factor theory of personality or the modern trait theory lies more in the practice, it is more convenient to have a proper discussion.

Characteristics of Trait Theory

1. Leadership motivation is one of the prime faces of the Trait Theory, which implies more of the intense passionate trait of a person to form a team and provide leadership in an organisation
2. The trait of self-confidence is one of the important characteristics of this theory, the confidence in oneself helps one to grow immensely
3. The improvement of cognitive ability has been observed in the Trait Theory, which is more of the emotional adjustment and building of good analytical knowledge that is required to the organizational goal
4. Drive for achievement has been classified as one of the most successful characteristics of Trait Theory on the reference to that it implies that this defines a high effort, ambition factor clubbed with taking high risk initiatives

Contingency Theory

Contingency Theory has been quite popular in the situational diversified management structure, where it has been quite multifaceted. Contingency as the word implies, itself is a situation where the future event may be unaccounted for and the framework that has been used to diagnose the potential perils as well as to mitigate the negative impact on the organization (Britt, 2020). Contingency Theory becomes applicable in the network of management where it has been quite the drive to find out the kind of leadership use, designing of the job, participation of the workforce and critical understanding of the organizational outcome with the highlight of the managerial situations. Moreover, it may be stated that the internal instability accrues much to the organizational failure, which clearly has been associated with the managerial failure of the organization.

Different structures may occur where different factors of management play a role to understand the contingencies to rise and be resolved. The digital age has been moving in an incredible speed, and the management is required to deal with the different contingencies that may arise. In meaning of the internal contingency, it may be highlighted that the presence of a situation may occur that was previously unaccounted for, and has been dealt with by the management more strictly.  The organisational failure not only arises out of the managerial failure, although also due to the irresponsibility of the employees. The Contingency Theory highlights the development of the personality of the leader by the evolution of the situation in which the leader operates.

Characteristics of Contingency Theory

1. Contingency Theory more focuses on the understanding of the complex structure of a management, by facilitating the flow of tasks between different lawyers of the management and implementing the theoretical approach to the changing business environments
2. Contingency Theory applies or in the variable condition to define the necessary action that needs to be taken to implement a certain immediate condition arousal. The feature that highlights it more is the degree of adaptability that has been governed and managed by both managers and employers in the external as well as the internal environment

Situational Leadership Theory

Situational Leadership Theory works best with the leadership of the top managerial post, which highlights the effective style of management that by nature gets to be incorporated with the functioning of the leadership. The Situational Leadership Theory of Hersey and Blanchard has been put to most effective use of the evaluation of the performance of different employees, as it was in the past tested the performance of the employees in a situation of pre-test and post-test (Raza and Sikandar, 2018). This kind of leadership theory examines the different behaviours, and identifies the exact behaviour which finds it most useful under the particular leadership style. Although different employees perform better under different leadership styles, while one may perform to the fuels under a dictatorship tough management style, the other may function well under a cooperative leadership style. The age of digital consensus has been quite well advanced to understand the leadership style that has been put into effect, and the leadership style finds best use in first understanding which weakness of the business needs to be resolved by the application of Situational Leadership Theory.

Characteristics of Situational Leadership Theory

1. The most important characteristics of Situational Leadership have been defined in terms of the situation that has evolved, and not based on historical preferences. The theory finds it most useful when the member of an organisation is widely inexperienced and can improve their performance to a large extent.
2. The directive method of study adds good flexibility to the organisational efforts, and the fundamental core essence behind the theory lies in the fact that although the structure of the organisation may change, the adaptation of the leadership style may exert a definitive influence.
3. There also lies in the approach of situational leadership style that the employees meet a certain definitive guidance provided on the work spot, directing the employee to a broader goal of the organisation.

1.2 Technical Leadership Strength and Areas for Development in the Leadership Context

Table 1:  Strength and Areas for Development

(Source: Self-created)

Section 2: Leadership capabilities and Behaviours

Hyperlink Infosystem is a multinational information technology based company which has been functional for a long year term, which follows a pricing model and builds mobile applications for clients according to the demands (Hyperlinkinfosystem.co.uk, 2021). Hyperlink Infosytems faced a different work shift while big under the influence of global pandemic, where the working from remote conditions have been made possible by the company.

Geographically Dispersed Team Example:

It becomes an extremely challenging situation for the organisation to face while working in a remote situation due to lack of resources. The management becomes responsible for the timely management of their work, monitor the work more effectively, and provide a definitive outcome. The management structure that becomes responsible for the guidance of the employees within an organisation faces the maxima of the challenge, as in remote working conditions the issues regarding the work crop up most. The dispersed team that lies in different locations, meeting and organizing proper work schedules becomes quite difficult, when the communication is entirely based in virtual spaces.

Task: Quality Assurance Feedback System for mobile applications built by Hyperlink Infosystem team

Challenges: The diversified team has been facing different challenges during the remote working condition of the position of the company. In the post pandemic situation it had been quite difficult for the company to work in, because of the opportunities that have been missed by the employees being engaged in developmental works related to the company (Wang et al., 2021).

Managing Geographically Dispersed Teams (GDTs): The Geographically Dispersed Team (GDTs) is a noticeable sign of the change in the digital leadership, because of the obstacle that most digital leaders face to redirect and communicate with GDTs. The challenge that the GDT members face with mitigating the issues are mostly involved with the interaction of different employees in coding the application and updating their knowledge on machine learning and SQL.

Collaborating and influencing: The GDT members remain on the dispersed ground, so much separated from each other that the team members find it hard to understand the client’s needs. The lack of adaptability with the prevailing situation causes most issues, which the client management agency finds hard to locate and solve.

Efficient and effective communication: A clear lack of the communication between the digital leaders had placed an arduous condition in the organisation, because development of the mobile application needs complete monitoring of the quality assurance team and the application checking team. The absence of the physical presence of the two teams working in a collaboration had been quite a challenging outcome for the company. The only situation of Covid-19 had created the emergence of the substantial adaptation to crisis compensation in work, increasing the workload in the staffs (Brammer and Clark, 2020).

Routine Interaction feedback: The evolving of the system of video conferencing and conducting online collaborative presentations had been uplifting the digital leaders all throughout, where the work development had been quite sluggish. The lack of physical contact and various doubts arousing with the critical problems being addressed had been the main objective of the company. The routine indication feedback had been affluent in understanding the circulation of the employees’ feedback on the art of effective digital management.

2.1 Evaluating examples applied in practice

The different aspects of digital leadership have been facing opposition by the situational adversity in the work all throughout, and the altering of the work life move things go quite demanding for the digital leaders. Not only that many employees were not technologically quite deft, furthermore also the employees lacked many communication skills which had made the situation problematic. The chosen company of the case study is a mobile development company where almost all the work is carried out digitally, and the digital leader may always be present to monitor the different tasks in the company and retain the original value of the mobile based applications that the company had been processing. The workplace assimilation and group working facilities to boat the team spirits which was much curtailed by the employees for their feeling of being isolated and being separated from the organisation (Jaiswal and Arun, 2020). There exists a range of competitive advantage that the mobile application based company may take off, which may be according to the difference in the design structure and the differences that lie in the management systems. The work of a digital leader may be constituted to take complete responsibility and change the digital information processing system. Every IT cell constitutes a different ecosystem that overlooks the communication system, discussing the changes in different technologies that may be included and the internal projects that need rework based on specific demand criteria of the clients. The digital manager has to take care of the fact that the moral injury or the phenomenon that the psychological distress to employees designing several apps are minimised have been focussed on (Greenberg et al., 2020). The organization that processes millions of information during the millisecond needs more detailed monitoring of the workflow operations and the functional capability of the legacy. For an organisation such as an IT company, it is quite tough for the digital manager to hold the legacy of a successful business profile, it needs more of the operations being saturated at the maximum value of the success.

2.2 Ethical, social, and legal responsibilities of a digital leader

Ethical Responsibility: In the digital leader role, I will keep an eye to the standard of ethical conducts being maintained with the organisation even if the work has been all through remotely placed. The code of ethics consists of the building of trust, honesty and transparency towards work conduct, which although may seem hard to manage with the virtual environment, instead is manageable quite efficiently.

Social Responsibility: The responsibility that I assume as being the digital manager, on the part of social responsibility is in the role of identifying the strict following the company policy on never disclosed or sharing the work profile or personal virtual password, employee ID and financial disclosure information. The parent company may not be separated from the employee, the integral part of the company by being attached to the work culture for years now (Siregar, 2018). I will be assuring the manifest that the management is keeping a close eye to not let any company policies and any rules thus be violated. The social responsibilities include the teaching and making the employees aware of their dos and don’ts with the circumference of the company, even if the employees are quite scattered in different regions across the nation.

Legal Responsibility: There are several legalities that a company needs to assume and defer to, and many of the legal terms are not known by the employees. I will ensure the action being taken to understand the legal obligation has been successfully understood by every employee under my jurisdiction, and that such responsibilities s are communicated effectively to their junior work members.

Section 3: Business transformation

3.1 Working from home opportunity and practises

The emergence of Covid-19 has greatly changed the course of business operation where the global leaders have taken strict lockdown measures which forced the business leaders and organisations to take effective and genuine decisions for continuing the operation. The contemporary issues emerged as the working from home opportunity where employees got the flexibility of doing office work from the cosiness of the home. However, it has transformed the traditional practice of working at office spaces with better collaboration, cooperation and coordination to successfully accomplish the project and achieve the desired vision. The leadership role and responsibility has a wide range of applications to coordinate the employee with the new working model with specific collaboration and cooperation to satisfy the quality and timeline of the project more comprehensively. Leaders of the organisation with foresight and creativity have enabled the platform with pacific change to achieve sustainability in operational activity and market competitiveness (Sainger, 2018). Further, the leader acts as the pioneer of the change with adaptive nature and technological soundness which used to operate in the different organisational dimensions effectively.

Figure 1: Organisational dimensions of digital transformation

(Source: Sainger, 2018)

It has been mentioned that the leadership’s entanglement with the organisation keeps the operational flow according to the changed structure to improve the readiness of the organisational value chain. The digital transformation has evolved the characteristics of the leadership to manage and coordinate the employee with the new normal of working procedures with remote working as a work from home opportunity with increased telecommuting to mark and confirm the operational activity. Specifically, the use of a virtual environment which is a networked program enables a user to engage proficiently with own and other’s work within the environment through email, chat, web based document sharing with many other similar advanced technological applications. Video conferencing, data analytics, cloud computing, web services, big data, automation, corporate application, asset management service, corporate application, project management systems and many more features are examples of virtual reality which has allowed the leadership to continue to authenticate business practises (Hensellek, 2020). On the contrary, digital business transformation has paved the way to simplify the business process with increased efficiency, cost effectiveness and flexibility where small and medium organisations have joined the footsteps of bigger companies to influence the work from home practice.

The leadership style and approaches ease the communication and degree of participation more interesting and cognitive to analyse the operational status with more freedom to employee for contributing to the organisational goal. On a specific note, the high level digital orientation needs the changes in traditional approaches where the new tools and technology has adaptively changed the work structure more rapidly and leadership intervention remains vague. It may be argued that the digital transformation has decentralised the organisational practises with collective intelligence and competence becoming necessary to achieve organisational objectives easily with active supervision of leadership to daily jobs (Petry, 2018).

3.2 Digital transformation and technology to support the remote working method

The pandemic of the Covid-19 has transformed the global business structure which altered the available practises of people’s lives and businesses to focus on the technological up gradation for future opportunity and practises. The business practises adopt digital transformation to increase sustainability with several scope and opportunities such as work from home, remote working, hybrid work space, freelancing, e-communication, tele-working, tele-commuting, mobile work through advanced state of the art tools and technology. Furthermore, the digital transformation of business practises has increased the efficiency with regular information sharing through data driven technology to make effective decisions to propel the market competitiveness in an accurate and timely manner. Leadership behaviour may allow the task and relation oriented approach to continue performance activity of employees more elaborately during the situation of crisis. Individual job autonomy and team cohesiveness may be altered due to digital transformations and remote working manuals. More relevantly, leadership behaviour may connect the missing pattern to optimise the resources for organisational creativity, innovation for contemporary change management plans as well as skill sets to effectively guide and mentor the workforce (Sousa and Rocha, 2019).

It needs to mention that, the knowledge of digital technology and skills might positively shape the organisational behaviour with better coordination of employees and the work aligned with the specific business process. Leadership took initiatives to assess the overall well being of the employee in the changing context of the digital transformation where both physical and mental strengths are monitored and essentially motivated to become more participatory and effective. Other than that, the leadership’s responsibility is to essentially address the malfunction of technical tools and interfaces to systematically improve the organisational competitiveness. It may be opined that along with the business transformation the consumer’s also evolve more pragmatically with the growing use of digital tools and information through the use of the internet and smart phones. Additionally, the personalised and digital needs of customers are expected to change with better flexibility and generalised product and services for sophisticated solutions of the problems. The role of leadership is significant in the digital transformations of the organisation where it formulates the cultural habits and organisational behaviour to benefit the employee with clear visionary and cooperation for desirable outcomes (Sow and Aborbie, 2018).

It has been observed that, the strong communication skill, interpersonal skill, cultural competence and standard ethics in daily practises are more enthusiastic and viable to progressively bind the employee force with organisational values and goals with acceptance and support. More practically, the leadership communication and strong emotional intelligence with technical coordination effectively addresses the organisational issues in the contemporary scenario to withhold the business competitiveness. More specifically, Information and Communication technology (ICT), Robotics, Internet of things (IoT) and other contemporary tools and technology have shaped the outline of modern day work culture. The leadership’s skill to navigate the tools and technology to encompass the organisational productivity and efficiency has widened the scope of flexibility in the process for future usability and successive change management strategy for the enterprise (Schwarzmüller et al., 2018).

Section 4: Personal Development Plan

The maintenance of a personal account is to understand the reflection of one and define such plans according to the future set goals is one of the major outlines of creating a personal development plan. I usually set my personal achievement goals and maintain such goals, although that has been one of the most challenging things that are usually coming to me. The act of setting goals that may effectively manage a team and create within the personal understanding space of the workspace and close study of employees defines the Personal Development Plan for a digital manager. The demand for setting a goal is mostly to meet the appropriate time management to disrupt the negative effects of the work delays and increase the end productivity to set more priorities and build good proficiency (Lušňáková et al., 2021). I believe that for an IT based company that focuses mostly on the integration of the latest technology, updating software by the demand of the client is the parent motive. Although my real motive is to identify the scope for further improvements, and be more creative to plan the personalised improvements for making room for the updates.

Part -1 – Setting Goals

Table 2: Setting Goals

(Source: Self-created)

Part-2 – Personal Objectives

Table 3: Personal development plan

(Source: Self-created)

References

Brammer, S. and Clark, T., 2020. COVID‐19 and management education: Reflections on challenges, opportunities, and potential futures. British journal of Management, 31(3), p.453.

Britt, B.C., 2020. From cooperation to competition: an interaction-based contingency theory of communities of practice. Journal of Knowledge Management.

Doremus, C.F., 2020. Trait Theory of Allport. The Wiley Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences: Models and Theories, pp.413-416.

Gašević, D., Matcha, W., Jovanović, J., Pardo, A., Lim, L.A. and Gentili, S., 2019, September. Discovering time management strategies in learning processes using process mining techniques. In European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (pp. 555-569). Springer, Cham.

Greenberg, N., Docherty, M., Gnanapragasam, S. and Wessely, S., 2020. Managing mental health challenges faced by healthcare workers during covid-19 pandemic. bmj, 368.

Hensellek, S., 2020. Digital Leadership: A Framework for Successful Leadership in the Digital Age. Journal of Media Management and Entrepreneurship (JMME), 2(1), pp.55-69.

Hyperlinkinfosystem.co.uk. 2021. Contact Us | Custom Software, Web, & App Development Company | Hyperlink InfoSystem. [online] Available at: <https://www.hyperlinkinfosystem.co.uk/contact-us> [Accessed 20 December 2021].

Jaiswal, A. and Arun, C.J., 2020. Unlocking the COVID-19 lockdown: work from home and its impact on employees.

Lušňáková, Z., Dicsérová, S. and Šajbidorová, M., 2021. Efficiency of Managerial Work and Performance of Managers: Time Management Point of View. Behavioral Sciences, 11(12), p.166.

Petry, T., 2018. Digital leadership. In Knowledge Management in Digital Change (pp. 209-218). Springer, Cham.

Raza, S.A. and Sikandar, A., 2018. Impact of leadership style of teacher on the performance of students: An application of Hersey and Blanchard situational model. Bulletin of Education and Research, 40(3), pp.73-94.

Sainger, G., 2018. Leadership in digital age: A study on the role of leader in this era of digital transformation. International Journal on Leadership, 6(1), p.1.

Schwarzmüller, T., Brosi, P., Duman, D. and Welpe, I.M., 2018. How does the digital transformation affect organizations? Key themes of change in work design and leadership. mrev management revue, 29(2), pp.114-138.

Siregar, I.F., 2018. ETHICAL ASSESSMENT MANAGER AGAINST A CONFLICT OF INTEREST THE CORPORATE SOCIAL INTEREST THE CORPORATE SOCIAL. Akuntansi dan Teknologi Informasi, 12(2).

Sousa, M.J. and Rocha, Á., 2019. Digital learning: Developing skills for digital transformation of organizations. Future Generation Computer Systems, 91, pp.327-334.

Sow, M. and Aborbie, S., 2018. Impact of leadership on digital transformation. Business and Economic Research, 8(3), pp.139-148.

Wang, B., Liu, Y., Qian, J. and Parker, S.K., 2021. Achieving effective remote working during the COVID‐19 pandemic: A work design perspective. Applied psychology, 70(1), pp.16-59.

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