Five decades of leadership and 'disruptive' technology: from e-leadership and virtual team leadership to current conversations on digital leadership

Digital technologies (DTs), which encompass social, mobile, analytics, cloud and internet of things, currently present a disruptive force across multiple organisational levels (Sebastian et al., 2017). At the organisational level, DTs disrupt customer demands, business infrastructures and organisational boundaries (Vial, 2019). At team level, DTs transform work processes and erode existing hierarchies (Liao, 2017). At individual employee level, they alter productivity, but also workloads, work-home boundaries and skill requirements (Bauwens et al., 2020; Bauwens et al., 2021b). As several organisations undergo digital transformations and navigate the complexity of DTs – with mixed results – questions are raised over which success factors contribute to such processes (Weber et al., 2022). In response, an increasing number of scholars argue that leadership, defined as a process of influence in the interest of ‘facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives’ (Yukl, 2010, p. 8), is critical to successfully manage the challenges associated with DTs (Avolio et al., 2014; Cortellazzo et al., 2019; Porfírio et al., 2021). However, do traditional leadership approaches account for situations where work and work processes are influenced or mediated by DTs? Alternatively, do they need to be adjusted – or even replaced – by other approaches? These and other questions have given rise to a five-decade-long scholarly conversation along the lines of concepts like ‘e-leadership’, ‘virtual team leadership’ and recently ‘digital leadership’. While each of these concepts reflect a desire to unravel what constitutes effective leadership against the background of DTs challenges in organisations (Torre and Sarti, 2020), different foci, shifts in meaning and the highly fragmented, multidisciplinary nature of this conversation – with contributions from information systems, organisational psychology and management – has made this a complex literature to traverse (Avolio et al., 2014; Cortellazzo et al., 2019). As a consequence, technology is not well-integrated in leadership literature and the impact of these studies remains limited as practice surpasses theory (Van Wart et al., 2019). Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is to present to the reader a brief overview of the conversation on leadership and technology, of which a graphical depiction is presented in Figure 8.1. We start from what we believe are the intellectual roots of the conversation: studies on computer-mediated groups examining the boundary conditions of traditional leadership approaches. Subsequently, we discuss the emergence of e-leadership and its consolidation in the debate on virtual team leadership. The discussion proceeds alongside a greater awareness of context, which led to the concept of digital leadership, with a more macro-orientation entering the conversation. We end our overview by discussing the impact of Covid-19, which has created a novel emphasis on virtual teams due to working from home mandates, before presenting the implications for future research and practice.