Framing Leadership Challenges in the Digital Age: The Role of Senior Leaders

Abstract

The Digital Age innovations greatly change how people gain information, communicate,work, make decisions, solve problems and even how they spend their spare time.It certainly effects trust relations at workplace between leaders and followers posinggreat challenges for leaders, especially for senior ones who do not belong to the so-callediGeneration, those who were not born into the age of social media, automatization,artificial intelligence, and the jungle of millions of apps. As a result, we can observe awidening generational gap between junior and senior leaders. Nevertheless, how cansenior leaders drive the change in the Digital Age without having the necessary digitalmaturity? What are the implications and challenges for leadership? TransformationalLeadership is proven to be the most effective leadership approach but without mutualtrust, leaders will have no other choice than employ transactional leadershipapproaches which is less effective. Thus, the question how to maintain trustfulrelationship at workplace between trustee and trustor in the world of digitalization israther important. It is even more significant in military where people need to trusteach other with their lives. This paper aims to frame this problem and raise awarenessof this phenomena to initiate further research and discussions on the challenges ofsenior leaders in the Digital Age.