Self-management and Self-leadership in the Digital and AI Era: An Overview and Future Directions

Abstract

This special issue was developed to call for more scholarly attention to self-management and self-leadership research. Technological advances have embraced many kinds of new economy and organizational design such as platform economy, telecommuting, and humans working alongside machines, among others. Digital technologies and AI not only make organizations more open, flat, and flexible, but also increase individuals’ capacity to process information and make decisions, and their autonomy in choosing when and where to work. Meanwhile, as digital natives, Generation Z’s work behaviors are increasingly influenced by social media. All these changes have weakened the effectiveness of traditional organizational control that is mainly based on a formal system of rules and procedures; effective organizational control relies more and more on organizational members’ self-management or self-regulation. Therefore, self-management and self-leadership are particularly important and essential in the era of digital technology and AI. We encourage organizational scholars to research self-management and self-leadership in the context of advances in digital technology and AI: Investigate organizations’ novel practices in this digital and AI era, and research on the underlying meanings, manifestations, and working mechanisms of self-management and self-leadership. This special issue collected four empirical papers that respectively examine the effects of AI on employees’ thriving at work, sales employees’ self-leadership behaviors in digital platforms, the effects of algorithm-based decision-making on employees’ procedural fairness perceptions, and the effects of algorithm-based decision-making on employees’ overall justice perceptions and deviance behaviors. Building on these empirical papers, we invite more research on self-management and self-leadership that may contribute to the optimization of human resources in the era of digital technology and AI.