Leaders, Empower Your Workforce! Analyzing Leadership in Internal Crowd Work

Abstract

New digital and agile forms of work organization require new leadership styles and competencies. Still, the understanding of leadership in these new forms of work is in its infancy. We select internal crowd work (ICW) as one, clearly defined new form of work and increase understanding of leadership in this context by analyzing four distinct cases of ICW. Based on qualitative interviews, we describe how employees perceive psychological empowerment and develop workforce agility through different leadership styles in ICW. As our main contribution, we detail and extend existing research regarding ICW and empowerment by identifying structural antecedents that affect psychological empowerment of ICW as well as consequences of an empowered workforce in ICW. Thereby, we indicate that an empowered workforce is an important factor for the implementation of workforce agility in ICW. Moreover, regarding leadership, we explain the design and changes of leadership in ICW in detail and explicate a new requirement for leaders in agile and digital form of work organization: the flexible handling of different context-specific situations, projects and tasks. For this purpose, we develop a theoretical model that describes the effects of shared leadership, empowering leadership and e-leadership on workforce agility mediated by an empowered workforce.