LD7090 Leadership in a Digital Age Assignment Sample 2024
Introduction
The current time and technological innovation has paved the work culture to transform into the digital age where leadership roles and responsibilities have immense effect to shape the organizational behaviour for attaining growth and prosperity. In this report, the detail of leadership roles and responsibilities will be discussed briefly.
Section 1: Leadership and Self analysis
1.1 Evaluation of leadership model and theories in respect to Digital leadership
Leadership of an organization is important to push the organizational culture forward according to market need and trend to make the standard application of resources and technology through strategic changes, motivation, support, monitoring and interaction.
The behaviour and personality with essential skills are significant to influence the employee’s motivation and urge to achieve the shared goal and objective more authentically. However, three leadership theories and models will be described to evaluate the corresponding changes for digital leadership to lead the organization in the right direction in the digital age to fulfil market needs.
Trait theory
Person’s basic trait or personality is commercially characterized in accordance with thoughts, feelings, behaviours and psychological conditions which is different for every individual and helps to dynamically measure the organizational need along with concurrent influence for growth.
Moreover the person’s multi-dimensional trait in various conditions with strength and quality gained inborn or innate which effectively mobilizes the organization for a shared vision and competitively achieves the strategic outcome. The individual’s emotional stability, intellects, extravert, sensitivity, self reliance, openness are equipped to lead the organization for efficient outcome with dominance and boldness (Wyatt and Silvester, 2018).
Characteristics of Trait theory
- The inborn quality of leadership guides and outlines the organizational outlook which mobilizes the employees for better results and efficiency
- The leadership assertiveness is counted through the flexibility and adaptability with the specific need and employee loyalty
- Cognitive ability and self confidence helps to drive the employeefor better effort along with the leadership’s accountability in decision making, conflict resolution, critical thinking and analytical capabilities
- The trait theory of leadership often influenced by environmental influence where emotional maturity has broadly define the dynamic capabilities of the leader with honey and integrity (Lievens et al.,2018)
Trait theory Vs Digital leadership
- The leadership’s personal behavioural traits are important to devise plan and implement changes in the organization and inspire the employees corresponding to changes strategy to grow progressively both professionally and personally
- Creativity and innovative approach of the digital leadership shape the organizational structure to respond to the market changes more quickly for delivering result
- Leadership traits are driving the employees of the organization for gaining competitive marketing advantage through skills and adaptability
- The sound knowledge of technology and tools help the digital leadership to make effective decisions through data driven technology.
Servant theory of leadership
The servant leadership theory is based on the leadership servitude to the employees for influencing the individual performance, creativity and continuity to achieve the organizational goal. On a specific note, a servant leader is involved to assess and manage the employee’s need and requirement to empower the individual with high potential, teamwork, and commitment towards the organizational aim with better focus and sustainability of work life balance.
The leader started as the servant to the employee to gain the confidence, loyalty and trust more warmly which may designated the leader for leading the team to grow the market competitiveness more profoundly (Gandolfi and Stone, 2018).
Characteristics of Servant leadership
- Attentive listening is the main characteristics of servant leadership theory where it enhances the communication with the employees and help addressing issues more clearly
- Empathy and healing are other important characteristics of servant leadership where leader is able to recognize and understand the individual feelings and emotion appropriately and support the team
- It usually encourages the diversity of thought to influence employee creativity along with fostering leadership in the individual to create a culture of trust and belief in the organizational atmosphere.
- Servant leadership create organizational commitment and follower’s loyalty and trust in the leadership intrinsically which boost the employee motivation for better engagement and performance (Setyaningrum et al., 2020)
Servant leadership Vs Digital leadership
- Servant leadership works completely opposite to the traditional leadership where individual ego of the leadership does not have any effect in the organization
- Digital leadership lead the team through coordinating the technology with tools for better collaboration and cooperation
- Servant leadership is not suitable for every organization and the community and cultural influence of the organization might helpful to accomplish the project goal through assisting the employees
- Digital leadership help to instil the curiosity and creativeness in individual with consolidated technical skills for achieving organizational goal
Contingency theory
The contingency theory is focused on the leadership compatibility and effectiveness in different conditions with specific skills and qualities bestowed upon the leadership to manage the organizational competitive with value creation.
It may be noted that the leadership effectiveness is completely situational which will determine the certain technique, skills and qualities to successfully manage the situation. It also developed as per the market dynamism with the influence of internal and external factors which implied the leadership ability and effectiveness for certain situations (Bachrach and Mullins, 2019).
Characteristics of Contingency theory
- It allows the leadership to exercise certain skills and qualities depending on the situational need to accommodate the team requirements for achieving organizational objectives
- It has been focusing on the organization identification and risk propensity to stabilize the organizational operation in the time of uncertainty (Prasad and Junni, 2017)
- Contingency theory of leadership follows the determination, confidence and abilities of the leadership which may enlighten the employee motivation and performance to actively participate in organizational need
- Flexibility, adaptability and less supervision are the important characteristics of contingency theory leadership which approximately deal for long term viability of the organizational objective
Contingency theory Vs Digital leadership
- Contingency leadership are situational where leadership abilities may found sustainable or unsustainable depending upon the situation and leadership response
- Digital leader always deal the particular situation in correspondence with technological support
- It needs to mention that the task oriented job might be affected due to degree of freedom and flexibility practiced in the contingency theory of leadership
- Digital leadership is well-acknowledged about the task oriented job and often support the other employees for task oriented job
1.2 Analysis of strengths and areas for development of technical skill in digital leadership
| Strengths | Areas for development |
| 1. Comprehensive listening and writing skills allow me to give authentic presentation of the project with collaborating the individual responses
2. The skill of adaptability and flexibility helps me to accept inevitable changes in the work function 3. My emotional intelligence helped me to establish cordial relationship with the employee with extending support to both physical and mentally pressure 4. Multicultural competence of me allows me to effectively coordinate and engage with the diverse team with respect to individual dignity 5. The critical and strategic thinking and allows me to instil the creativity and innovativeness in the employee mindset to ease the operational complexity and grow inwardly 6. The task oriented nature has helped me to accomplish the project and guide the team members for organizational growth
|
1. Lack of strong communication skill has put me in a uncomfortable zone to relate the organizational need with the subordinates
2. The lack of time management skill is delaying my accomplishments on a adverse manner 3. Lack of decision making skills has left me in the corner at the time of necessity 4. Lack of interpersonal skills has left me unuttered in coordination among the several teams and projects as necessary for the project integration 5. Lack of inspirational or motivational skill is Reducing the organizational productivity and trust worthiness. 6. High assertiveness sometimes irritates the fellow employees work function which might negatively influence the employee commitment
|
| 1. Good listening skill
2. Empathy 3. Multicultural competence 4. Strategic and critical thinking 5. Analytical skill
|
1. Lack of strong communication
2. Lack of decision making 3. Lack of conflict management skill 4. Lack of interpersonal kill 5. Lack of organizational orientation |
| 6. Creative
7. Task oriented 8. Open minded 9. Passionate 10. Confident |
1. Reluctant to open up
2. Avoid to delegate responsibilities 3. Perfectionist 4. focus less |
Table 1: strengths and Areas for development
(Source: self-created)
Section 2: Evaluation of Capabilities and behaviour of digital leadership
It may be argued that the capability and behaviour of leadership is responsible for widening the organizational scope to attain the objective in a suitable manner with the digital transformation of the company. More practically, the digital leadership capabilities and behaviours need to consist of the integrity and passion to collaborate, cooperate and open to ideas and solution, social and cultural competence, inspirational and resilient to operational disintegration and continuity (Meier et al., 2017).
Technological advancement and critical environmental shift has allowed the business enterprises to adopt the revolving work culture of remote and hybrid working methods to withstand the business need and opportunity. Digital leadership capabilities are best exercises to bind the dispersed team in a common line of integration for more cumulative business function.
Geographically dispersed team example
Spotify is the fast growing online digital music services with podcasts and video streaming service provider which was launched in 2008 in Sweden with subscription service of 381 million users across 184 markets (Spotify. 2021). The wake of the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed the organization to adopt the work from anywhere model where the employee are working in diverse range of task with engineering, content, analytics, product management, business development, design, Human Resource (HR), legal and other.
More specifically, the employees are working together to uniquely represent the organization to the market for exclusive experience of listening and discovering the tunings from over the globe. The leadership under the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Daniel Ek has organized the organizational work functionality for managing successively the dispersed team cohortedly to serve the consumer requirements.
Task
It needs to mention that, the employees are responsible to integrate the diverse range of functionally more concisely for audio tuning, podcasts, high quality video streaming with the offering opportunities to million number artists around the globe. The diverse team is supporting the organization from dispersed locations to satisfy more than billion fans worldwide to tune with favourite artists.
Challenges
Primarily the organization faces several issues from the employee compatibility with the situational crisis to coordinate, develop, and co-operate the work structure comprehensively for sustainability. The integration of the process of developer, artists, compensation classifications, content editor, analytics and designer to accompany the organizational need with market trends along with communications for improvement and motivation.
Organizational productivity is dependent upon team collaboration and timely development and design for the right content to the market with growing market consumption (Yeung, 2020). On the other hand, it closes the scope of innovation with strict social distancing measures where previously employees are frequently engaged with creative discussion, conversation, debate and cross examination.
Managing geographically dispersed team
It needs to mention that the managing geographically dispersed team necessitates the extensive exercise of leadership skill, abilities along with safe and sound technological knowledge to bind the team together for achieving the shared mission of the organization. Leadership’s effective decisions has enabled the organization to build a healthy atmosphere of work culture around dispersed teams which may seem challenging to motivate the individual creativity (Appelgren, 2021).
The extraordinary design of music platform with cross functionality for the smooth transition through User Interfaces (UI) and user experience might experience 24*7 supports for uninterrupted services for consumers.
Team collaboration
Team collaboration is the important aspect of business needs where communication and interpersonal skills of the leadership allow the team to design and develop better solutions for the consumer. On the contrary, the leadership engagement with the employee with frequent communication enriched the trust, credibility, loyalty to endorse the adaptability and flexibility in the new distributed work structure where the leadership confidence and accountability enable the smooth functioning of the organization.
Effective and efficient communication
Communication is the most significant approach to maintain and coordinate the geographically dispersed team in a unique direction where leadership efficiently uses the emerging tools and technology of communication. The effective use of phone, mail, video conference and distributed repository to communicate, save and integrate the overall work function in a single platform.
Frequent Interaction feedback
The leadership monitoring and assessing the individual performance and productivity with necessary feedback interaction helps the employee to conceptualize the level of work magnitude with scope of development and cooperation.
2.1 Examples applied in practice
It may be opined that, the leadership’s active participation in the period of the Covid-19 has marginalized the magnitude of uncertainty, fear and avoidance with appropriate use of opportunity and scope to generalize the team productivity of geographically dispersed team members.
Technological advancement utilizes the services of communication and interaction more sophisticatedly with the use of smart phones, video calling, Whatsapp, Facebook, Skype, Zoom meetings along with several other tools and services encircling the dispersed team to grow without interruption. On a specific note, the leadership effective decision makes and negotiation skills have helped to intervene according to the data driven information for the organizational need and business direction more conveniently.
The analytics, information and data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, robotics have made it easy and usual for enriched communication and interaction with exclusive man-machine cross functionality for the business continuity in the organization. The agile development framework of Scrum, Github, stack overflow helped to manage the cross team interfaces and dependencies with reduced complexity and increased transparency may develop the workflow and productivity for managing the cash flow with positive profit margin (Crofoot, 2020).
For instance, as a digital leader I need to cooperate and coordinate the team with strategic changes as per the market standard with strong communication with the employee for exclusive training, frequent engagement with motivation to continue flow of the work.
2.2 Ethical, social and legal responsibilities of digital leadership
Ethical
It may be opined that the ethical responsibility is crucial for digital leadership to define and mediate the organizational work culture more conclusive through the time period where leadership with cultural competence and interpersonal skill manage the individual for shared objectives.
Individual trust, respect, dignity, fairness, data security, with increased transparency will be my responsibility to maintain the work ethics for the time being of remote working methods for employee satisfaction and organizational reputation (Rothrock et al., 2018).
Social
Social responsibility needs to be incorporated accurately in the organizational objectives to share the benefits for social upliftment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to alleviate hunger and equal distribution of resources along with waste reduction and pollution control.
I will actively take the scope of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to eliminate poverty and other needs along with the employee engagement in the social sector to arrange a liable participation for the wellbeing of employees and the society.
Legal
The heart of responsibility lies with the legal responsibilities where it needs to be accustomed with law, regulations of the land in accordance with the legal framework of health, safety, transaction regularity and organizational outcome. I will need to accompany the organizational policy with pertinent to government rule and policy to decor organizational policy to defend the employee from risks with necessary maintenance of hygiene and cleanliness and social welfare.
Section 3: Business transformation
3.1 Changing traditional ways of conferencing to video conferencing
The existence of different electronic mediums has facilitated the communication, and the scenario has changed drastically with some years. In the previous times, there had been this situation where the conferencing was mostly by the method of physical means, it has evolved to being a virtual way of communication and the speed of the communication has benefited various business organizations (Guerin, 2017).
Video Conferencing
The traditional ways of communication have aged much different ways of communication and among them in this digital era, the most important thing that has been found is the video conferencing thing. Technology has connected millions of lives, and the different ways of business communication have been effective ways to improve the structure of the management.
Work in isolation
The post Covid-19 situation has changed the world to a completely different thing, and the necessity of business, members not being cooperate and have been an essential norm. In such a world, video conferencing has become a normal breakthrough, and this particular kind of communication has facilitated a lot of big corporations all around the world.
Video conferencing helps to effectively build a neural network and have a lasting effect in the process where the facilitation of cognition and support affects a business organization positively (Hardwick and Anderson, 2019). Different business organizations, be it public or private, have adopted the use of video conferencing in a wide scale, because of it being an essential tool to connect with the remote workforces, customer and employee contacts (Somani, 2021).
3.2 Digital technologies adopted for video conferencing
- Digital Environment
The digital environment facilitates the communication of the different employees simultaneously within a given bracket of time, and the connection may be made to remorse areas of work. The different strategic planning arises mostly during the meeting of all the employees along for the moment, and such a meeting may be accommodated with the converging point of a business meeting.
Some organizations have different scattering ports spread all along the globe, and such different locations may effectively have the benefit of having a diverse meeting within a short span of time by the video conferencing system. The digital environment facilitates workers to have an effective communication which lets them to upgrade their work quality, where remote connection is required mostly.
The productivity of different workers in a business organization may differ, and such things although becomes quite difficult to monitor, on the greater hand, it becomes beneficial for the employer to monitor the workers effectively through video conferencing.
- Digital setup
The digital environment has a broad perspective to discuss, the worker efficiency and digital environment may suffer, yet for employees stationed in remote locations, it becomes quite useful for them to have a digital communication system setup. It becomes quite difficult for several workers to travel and yet communicate in the required time, and the issue is resolved mostly by the presence of digital communication.
Many digital communication setups such as Zoom Video Conferencing, Microsoft Corp Meetings, Google Meet, StarLeaf Ltd, Cisco Systems and few others have evolved a great way to build a good virtual communication style.
3.3 Importance of digital transformation for video conferencing
The importance of video conferencing is felt by many organizations in the long run, where the feature of the different video conferences, if put together, may serve as the best guide towards having a foundational basis. The advantage of video recording, screen recording, live broadcasting and screen sharing and screen translation provided by several video conferencing tools have come as a great way to the users as well as to the employees working in an organization.
The reduction of business redundancy while maintaining the spreadsheet has been the greatest feature of the virtual meeting, and the communication style has been live, quite appreciating in the business management. The integration of the live system with the feature of commenting while a live meeting is being hosted, this thing might never be found in the physical conference in the classic times.
For different business corporations, the reduction of costs and having a virtual workspace with strong encryption is something which is completely special and marvellous. It has been the fact that different business organizations often complain about the intrusion of their privacy while working and the taking of private space, which is not possible in a virtual workspace.
The different challenge that may be faced while video conferencing is the fact that the feedback system of the employees may suffer, and also the challenging aspect of the actual understanding of the concepts and terminologies that are used, may be difficult to decipher. Such challenges are short and that may be improved upon by building an automated feedback system by taking a poll or a similar thing used within the organization (Frisch and Greene, 2020).
Video conferencing improves the business structure to a better degree by making partnership stronger, pitching much better to the international clients, and true fraction of business that may suffer considerably while having a strict mechanism going on regarding the quality of work, such a case has the opportunity of having a good equation of video conferencing.
The education on cost and the valuable time consumption that is usually spent while commuting is saved mostly by having the benefit of having a video conferencing with most of the employees during the normal weekdays.
This may also happen that the business consists of different employees where the geographical location of such employees are lying wide and far, in different islands and continents, and in such a case, the only plausible method to connect with is the adoption of the shortest route of video conferencing. The productivity of the employees may increase to a greater degree because of the lack of spending in the time and energy percentage of the employees, the well defined start6 module of the video conferencing within the allocated time has a greater benefit of increasing the productivity of the employees in the organization.
Section 4: personal development plan
The personal development plan is important to conceptualize the self abilities and qualities in accordance with market standard and effectively manage the strengths and areas of development to grow proportionately for high stability of career and dream. Further, my cognitive skills, business skills, strategic thinking and objectives are important to foster my abilities to grow as a digital leader with the essential skill set to effectively lead the digital team.
The emergence of a multi dimensional skill set will place me in a comfortable position where the rapid changing business aspects and growing outstandingly to meet the consumer need and gain the market perspectives to successfully establish myself as a world leader.
Part 1: Setting goals
Short term goal (1 year)
- My short term goal is to join and complete the training program of Java development with different specifications of Spring Boot, Hibernate and advanced programs.
- I need to complete the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and machine learning course to bind the programming language with the machines to incorporate innovative ideas into physical manners.
- It also needs the acknowledgement of Application Process Interface (API) design for smooth functionary of man- machine interface
Midterm goal (2-3 year)
- My midterm objective to join a technology firm who are incorporating innovation into automotives to exercise my learning comprehensively and build a unique automotive with state of the art functionality
Long term goal (5 year)
- My long term goal is to work as a Project Manager at Tesla which will give the opportunity to build a unique lotion for mankind with extensive automotives and technological collaboration for future ready options.
Part 2: Personal objectives
| Areas of development | Ways to achieve
goals |
Required resources | Development measurement | Required time |
| Strong
communication skill |
Continuous interaction with friends seniors and professional | Human resource | Cross checking the communication development in online platform and feedback from the professional | 3 months |
| Time management | Engage in time bounding exercise as appearing frequent exam for more concentration and self efficacy | Human and financial resource | Checking up the to do list with specific measure of pre-calculation | 4 months |
| Developing leadership of decision making and conflict resolution | Online tutorials along with attending workshops to exercise the decision making and conflict resolution in practical issues | Human and financial resources | Continuous practice with more relative scenarios’ with feedback from mentors | 4 months |
| Developing
Self propelling automotive unit |
Use my skill set and technology along with attending workshops of explicit meta- functionary design of electronics and information communication technology | Human and financial resource | Continuous checking of the automotive unit functionary and development | 6 month |
Table 2: Personal Development Plan
(Source: Self-created)
References
Appelgren, E., 2021. Media Management During COVID-19: Behavior of Swedish Media Leaders in Times of Crisis. Journalism Studies, pp.1-18.
Bachrach, D.G. and Mullins, R., 2019. A dual-process contingency model of leadership, transactive memory systems and team performance. Journal of Business Research, 96, pp.297-308.
Crofoot, L., 2020. Management of cross-team interfaces in large-scale agile development (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
- Guerin, T., 2017. A demonstration of how virtual meetings can enhance sustainability in a corporate context: Quantified benefits of virtual meetings through video conferencing. Environmental Quality Management, 27(1), pp.75-81.
Frisch, B. and Greene, C., 2020. What it takes to run a great virtual meeting. Harvard Business Review.
Gandolfi, F. and Stone, S., 2018. Leadership, leadership styles, and servant leadership. Journal of Management Research, 18(4), pp.261-269.
Hardwick, J. and Anderson, A.R., 2019. Supplier-customer engagement for collaborative innovation using video conferencing: A study of SMEs. Industrial Marketing Management, 80, pp.43-57.
Lievens, F., Lang, J.W., De Fruyt, F., Corstjens, J., Van de Vijver, M. and Bledow, R., 2018. The predictive power of people’s intraindividual variability across situations: Implementing whole trait theory in assessment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(7), p.753.
Meier, C., Sachs, S., Stutz, C. and McSorley, V., 2017. Establishing a digital leadership barometer for small and medium enterprises (SME). In Management challenges in a network economy: Proceedings of the MakeLearn and TIIM International Conference 2017 (pp. 103-109). ToKnowPress.
Prasad, B. and Junni, P., 2017. A contingency model of CEO characteristics and firm innovativeness: The moderating role of organizational size. Management Decision.
Rothrock, R.A., Kaplan, J. and Van Der Oord, F., 2018. The board’s role in managing cybersecurity risks. MIT Sloan Management Review, 59(2), pp.12-15.
Setyaningrum, R.P., Setiawan, M. and Irawanto, D.W., 2020. Servant Leadership Characteristics, Organisational Commitment, Followers’ Trust, Employees’ Performance Outcomes: A Literature Review. European Research Studies, 23(4), pp.902-911.
Somani, M.A., 2021. A STUDY ON USAGE OF VCAAS (VIDEO CONFERENCING AS A SERVICE) PROVIDER WITH RESPECT TO ZOOM VIDEO COMMUNICATIONS DURING COVID-19 IN JAIPUR.
Spotify — About Spotify. Spotify. (2021). Retrieved 24 December 2021, from https://newsroom.spotify.com/company-info/.
Wyatt, M. and Silvester, J., 2018. Do voters get it right? A test of the ascription-actuality trait theory of leadership with political elites. The Leadership Quarterly, 29(5), pp.609-621.
Yeung, T.Y.C., 2020. Did the COVID-19 Pandemic trigger nostalgia? Evidence of music consumption on Spotify. Evidence of Music Consumption on Spotify (August 21, 2020).
Know more about UniqueSubmission’s other writing services:
