Leadership Competencies for Digital Transformation - Skills and Traits Sought by Practitioners

Abstract

One of the greatest challenges organizations face today is taking advantage of the opportunities offered by advanced information and communication technology. In order to successfully master this digital transformation, organizations need change leaders capable of envisioning, planning, implementing, and managing new business models. Apart from conceptual and practice-oriented contributions, however, there are no empirical studies that analyze what kind of leadership competencies are considered necessary by practitioners. Hence, in order to draw conclusions for research and practice, job requirements outlined in 274 job advertisements explicitly targeting digital transformation experts were identified and categorized applying the leadership skills strataplex taxonomy. Our results reveal a higher importance of managerial and leadership skills compared to technical skills, and thus are similar to the requirements of earlier strategic change processes. This can be interpreted in different ways. Either practitioners overlook important specific leadership competencies or researchers and other experts wrongly overemphasize the technological novelty of digital transformation.