Självledarskap vid digitaliseringsförändringar : En kvalitativ studie inom revisionsbranschen

Sammanfattning: The world is getting more and more digitalized, and the progress has been further accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. In March 2020, the Public Health Agency of Sweden encouraged everyone that could to work from home. The auditing industry is one of the affected industries due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the risk of an impaired quality in the audit was high. One thing that increases in importance when working from home is self-leadership since the individual is getting a greater responsibility to plan their workday.  The purpose of this study is to describe how self-leadership strategies are used by auditors to handle digitalization changes, and to develop a framework. The purpose will be answered by the following research question:  How are self-leadership strategies used by auditors to handle digitalization changes?  The method used in this study is a qualitative case study where each respondent forms an individual case. The empirical material has been collected by semi-structured interviews with six respondents. After the interviews, the empirical material has been analyzed by a thematic analysis.  This study shows that self-leadership strategies are generally used by the auditors, and the most used behavior-focused strategies are self-goal-setting, self-rewarding, positive cues, and negative cues. Within the thought-focused strategies, the most commonly used are self-talk, belief and assumptions, and change of thought patterns. From the natural rewarding strategies, the most common are natural rewards, and only one respondent uses focus on positive aspects. The study shows that some of the strategies are used by the auditors independent of digitalization changes or changes due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Self-leadership strategies used to handle digitalization changes are foremost the thought-focused strategies and, to a certain extent, positive cues, negative cues, and natural rewards. The authors of this study have also found empirical support for the usage of other strategies that the respondents are using to handle digitalization changes and changes in the workplace due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The contribution of this study to the self-leadership research is hence the two new self-leadership strategies of focus together with recovery and relaxation.