Den digitala ledaren - En kvalitativ studie om hur ledarskapet har förändrats under åren 2020–2022

Abstract

The covid-19-pandemic was the starting point for a revolutionary period and was followed by a wave of digitization which above all accelerated the crisis of the digitalization journey of small and medium-sized enterprises. Today’s development takes place at a furious pace, something that not only gives rise to difficulties but that also enables change. Therefore, it is of interest to examine which aspects are essential in terms of leadership and change management in order to be able to design strategies for future challenges, but also to gain an understanding of what challenges have existed and what has been done to overcome them. The purpose of this study is to increase the understanding of how leadership has changed in connection with the expansion of digitalisation during the years 2020-2022, and how change management has been expressed during the same period. The study was conducted as a qualitative study with an inductive research approach. The empirical material of the study has been collected through semi-structured interviews with 15 respondents who either hold a leadership role or are employees. Finally, the empirical material has been analysed thematically on the basis of the themes on which the theoretical frame of reference is based. The study concludes that leadership has changed to some extent, and the three biggest changes that can be identified are that the employees have been overlooked, that the leadership has become more transactional and that the leaders have been forced to meet demands from society and at the same time maintain the efficiency of the organization. Furthermore, there is great variation in how change management has been conducted in the various organizations in this study, and differs based on what sector the organization operates in. Finally, it can be concluded that leaders to some extent work with change management based on Kotter's eight-step model, but that the work sometimes falls short, which can be explained by the fact that not all steps in the model are implemented.