Leadership in the Digital and Social Era - A Theoretical Review and Digital Gamification for Employee Development

Sammanfattning: The aim of this paper is to explore which skills and mindsets are necessary for successful leadership in the digital era. It is written for IKEA who are interested in remaining at the forefront of their industry by understanding how digitalisation affects their business and how to make the most of the opportunities it brings, one aspect of which is leadership. There is a gap in the existing knowledge on the topic of leadership in the digital era despite the amount research on the topics of digitalisation and leadership individually. We intend for this paper to contribute towards filling the gap by looking specifically at the intersection between the two areas. The method we used to determine which skills are needed by leaders in the digital age was a review of the existing academic literature together with non-academic sources to gain an understanding from a real business context. We faced challenges relating to a lack of sufficient empirical studies on the topic, as well as the importance of context to leadership, which limit our ability to make normative conclusions about leadership skills necessary in the digital age. The outcome of the literature review demonstrated that the ideas on leadership in the digital age are mostly homogenous, and while many sources lack empirical backing, they are in agreement with the opinions of business leaders. We identified four main categories of skills: communication, dealing with change, learning and practical changes, as well as one mindset, the growth mindset. There were two main themes throughout the review which we considered particularly important - openness to learning, which comes from a growth mindset, and empowerment of employees. We used this information as the basis of a game design which aims to help IKEA employees reflect on the way they deal with some of the challenges presented by digitalisation. We produced two sets of questions to be used as the starting point of a quiz game which can be expanded based on new research or by adding new topics. The game is based on encouraging reflection rather than scoring points due to the nature of our findings from the literature review, which are not conducive to determining correct and incorrect answers. Keywords: Digitalisation, Leadership, Skills, Mindset, Gamification