Leadership as Practice within a Remote Working Environment : Interview Study

Sammanfattning: The world is in a pandemic situation. Shifting to remote working has become a priority for many companies and remote work has become new normal. In doing so, industrial organizations are experiencing new challenges. Moving to the online way of working, new working conditions and different practical challenges they bring have created empirical context highly relevant for studying leadership which is currently a hot topic among scholars. Almost all studies, in the context of remote working, emphasize the importance of leadership.  Nevertheless, it is argued that the most recent literature and work on leadership have remained the leader-centered approach highly employed within traditional leadership literature. The leader-centered approach focuses on individual leaders and their traits, abilities, and actions, and thus contributes to placing the abstract phenomenon of leadership into distinct individuals, thereby supporting the taken-for-granted assumption that leadership is a single-person, heroic, task. Instead, scholars call for more studies that investigate leadership as ongoing social production of direction through constructions of space of action by actors in certain practice/practices. This emergent movement in leadership research is known as leadership as practice.  Accordingly, the aim of this thesis is to investigate leadership within the remote working environment, from leadership as practice perspective and through the construction of actors’ space of action. This includes an analysis of current leadership practices in relation to the construction of space of action as well as the analysis of practices that might potentially contribute to improving the current ones in doing so.  An interview study has been carried out at the three companies in Serbia, Germany, and the UK with a qualitative approach. The thesis builds on a theoretical framework and empirical data that have been collected through an extensive literature review and semi-structured interviews using an open-ended interview guide.  The result suggests that the current leadership practices are narrowing down the space of action. Also, the analysis of empirical data revealed that certain leadership practices have the potential to contribute to the construction of space of action within a remote working environment. The thesis’s insights might help companies to improve their own practices.