Leadership in times of change : Exploring the follower’s experience of digital transformation

Sammanfattning: Digital transformation is a challenging undertaking for most businesses. It disrupts prior organizational processes and structures and affects the way leadership is manifested. Leadership literature has historically focused a great deal on the leader’s perspective, even so in discussions concerning digital transformation. Scholars agree that followers are an essential part to leadership, yet their perspective is often overlooked in the discussion. This study focuses on the follower experience in digital transformation. Based on a review of extant literature, I structure a theoretical framework comprising several concepts such as; AIT, context, leadership style, digital mindset and digital fluency. I have collected data through semi-structured group-interviews and have adopted a narrative analysis to interpret the data collected from 21 respondents, from three different sectors, that have experienced digital transformation as followers. The insights from the study deepen our understanding of the follower’s perspective of digital transformation and highlight three areas of import for a successful digital transformation; trust, stress and work-life balance. I conclude the study by outlining directions for future research.