E-Leadership

The proliferation of information technology (IT) is creating a new context for leadership. Leaders must be proactive in the implementation and management of IT; to realize the benefits of IT deployment most fully, changes may be required in leadership style, corporate culture, and organizational structure. Challenges and opportunities are arising as organizations' stakeholders obtain, store, categorize, retrieve, and use information in new and faster ways. Customized relationships with stakeholders, made possible by advances in IT, are pressuring leaders to be more selective about their stakeholders and more responsive to them. The increasing use of electronic communication in organizations is also affecting leadership. [Page 418]Virtual teams, whose members communicate electronically because they work at a distance from one another—sometimes even on different continents—are increasingly common. While the basic functions of leadership found in conventional teams are not altered, the locus, relative importance, and performance of these functions are different in virtual teams.

In this entry, e-leadership is defined as a process of social influence that takes place in an organizational context where a significant amount of work, including communication, is supported by IT. That process of social influence is aimed at producing a change in attitudes, emotions, thinking, behavior, or performance. Let us consider e-leadership in five areas that Fred Dansereau and Francis Yammarino, experts in the field of organizational behavior and leadership, have identified as important in the study of leadership.

The first area, fundamental human processes, covers the set of psychological and related processes without which leadership would not be possible or, perhaps, relevant. It includes basic affective, cognitive, interpersonal, group, collective, and communication processes and factors. The second area, leadership core processes, covers what a leader does to exercise leadership. The third area, leadership outcomes, covers the ways in which leadership core processes are put together; examples include team building, delegation, and participatory decision making. The fourth area, secondlevel leadership outcomes, covers the effects of leadership core processes on performance, satisfaction, absenteeism, and turnover, among other variables. The last area, substitutes for leadership, presents enhancers, neutralizers of, or replacements for the leadership core processes.