Grenoble Graduate School of Business: Organizational Behavior Assignment

Impact of Information Technologies on Leadership

A short survey of E-Leadership

Patrick Petit
Faculty Lecturer: Carmelo Mazza professor at Grenoble Graduate School of Business

Key Words: Leadership, Executives, Information Technology, Organizational behavior, e-business, e-

leadership, Industrial Age, Information Age, Participation Age

Number of Words not including references: 967

Introduction
Business conduct in the workplace has been deeply transformed in less than a decade by the
information technology revolution of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Organizations modeled
on the industrial age paradigm of control and hierarchy have been replaced by a network of
decentralized and agile functional groups, which can adapt their structure and direction fast enough to
accommodate the continuously changing needs of the e-business economy. This radical change
suggests that managers have been facing a serious discontinuity challenge in the way organizations
are managed today, which has resulted in the emergence of a new leadership style called the e-
leadership or the virtual leader.
The goal of this short essay is to underline the motivation and main attributes of the e-leadership style
and describe how it has deeply affected the transformation process of the leaders of the e-business
economy.

E-leadership attributes an d skills in the P articipation Ag e

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of organizational behavior and leadership power in the
early 21st century, revolves around the question of what kind of new leadership attributes and skills
are required in times of cataclysmic changes driven by the Internet revolution. The information
technology boost currently under way has introduced a new set of tools and communication schemes
which have redefined people's interactions in the organization. For instance, the leader's role that was
before relatively clearly defined as a set of tasks to keep the organization running in a rigid and stable
organization structure, has now changed into managing an ecosystem of self-organized business units
running decentralized or even externalized business processes. Forester Research calls these extended
networks e-business networks, which are structures of inter-connected players cooperating in real
time over the Internet.
In a sense, organizations have somehow followed the same evolutionary pattern as the computer
systems that moved in the 1990s from big central computers to a distributed and resilient
infrastructure of inter-networked smaller computers.
As a result, the organization's flow chart has flattened to less hierarchical structures. Today, anyone
can communicate with anyone in an organization, regardless of rank, through e-mail. This was
probably unthinkable a little more than ten years ago. The technology has allowed workers to
transcend the limited role and relationships they used to have during the industrial age. For instance,
traditional conversation barriers standing between employees, customers, partners and suppliers have

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Grenoble Graduate School of Business: Organizational Behavior Assignment

fallen. People stand out and collaborate genuinely on the Internet - in what the Cluetrain Manifesto:
The end of business as usual calls voices - to make businesses build better products and services. The
manifesto makes the point that today markets themselves are conversations and that employees and
customers are organizing and becoming better informed faster than public relations departments could
ever control (Levin & All, 200). Communication technologies have enabled a new economic era
known as the Participation Age in less than a decade.
The speed of doing business, using broad access to information and knowledge, has increased
significantly. Pulley, McCarthy and Taylor (2000) states that between 1997 and 2000, the average
product development cycle had dropped to six months and the pace continues to accelerate.
These disruptive factors forced a profound paradigm shift from controlling and managing discrete
resources to influencing loose networks of self-driven people outside the traditional boundaries of
direct reporting groups. The degree to which communication technologies have flattened and
circumvent traditional channels of communication and information may have been terrifying for
conventional managers who placed their authority on rank and position, instead of skills, personalities
and interests.
Few researchers have studied the field of e-leadership, but over the years, a remarkably similar set of
qualities or attributes required for successful leadership has emerged, and there is no reason to believe
that self-awareness, empathy and influencing attributes will be any less relevant for e-leadership
(Kissler, 2001). However, among these attributes, the ability to build and retain talent as well as the
expertise in building and leading networks outside of their own organization are essential attributes of
the e-leader. The ability to develop emotional intelligence skills are also considered pivotal to the
success of e-leadership (Zaccaro and Bader, 2003) because the human element is one of the most
important factors in e-leadership (Pulley, McCarthy, Taylor, 2000).
E-business leaders need to foster an environment that promotes open communication to achieve
collective efficiency and keep people moving in the same direction because leadership initiatives can
come from anywhere in virtual teams, which were estimated to involve one employee in five in the
United States in 2003 (Trotier, nd). E-leadership focuses on collective tasks and perspectives that
move an organization in strategic directions as opposed to the entrepreneur's individual
characteristics, charisma or traits (Pulley, McCarthy, Taylor, 2000) as virtual teams create their own
leaders.
E-leadership must be able to screen out what is important from what is not, so that a meaningful
pattern can emerge as the flow and quantity of interwoven information can become quickly
overwhelming.
Perhaps one of the most important capabilities is the capacity to continuously form new relationships
that span distance, time and other organizations while always listening to customers and promoting
the interests of one's organization. To perform this task, e-leadership requires fluency with a variety of
communication tools ranging from the old telephone to e-mail, and videoconferencing or whatever
may emerge, and use them appropriately.

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Grenoble Graduate School of Business: Organizational Behavior Assignment

R eferences
Kissler, G. D., (2001), E-Leadership . Organizational Dynamics [serial online]. Available from:
Business Source Complete, Ipswich, MA.
Levine, F., Locke, C., Searls, D., & Weinberger D., (2000), 'The Cluetrain Manifesto: The end of
business as usual', December, Cambridge: Perseus Books Group
Pulley M, McCarthy J, Taylor S., (2000), E-Leadership in the Networked Economy. Leadership in
Action [serial online]. July 2000. Available from: Business Source Complete, Ipswich, MA.
Trottier M. (nd), Le E-Leadership , Observatoire de Gestion stratégique des resources humaines,
[Online], Available: www.observatoiregsrh.uqam.ca/UserFiles/File/Dossier
%20leadership/Article_MT-E-Leadership.pdf, April 25
Zaccaro S, Bader P. E. (2003), Leadership and the Challenges of Leading E-Teams: Minimizing the
Bad and Maximizing the Good . Organizational Dynamics [serial online]. January 2003,
Available from: Business Source Complete, Ipswich, MA.

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