Overview: The digital revolution and the growth of information communication technologies (ICTs)* has had an extraordinary effect on society, and leadership is not an exception. Despite calls at the turn of the century to investigate e-leadership (Avolio et al. 2001), many years later there has been very little progress toward answering those calls- “[t]he gap between the practice and implementation of AIT [advanced information technologies] and what we know about its effects has grown over the last decade” (Avolio et al. 2014). Nowhere has this gap been more evident than in the public sector despite its widespread use and specialized needs and constraints. This article discusses what an agenda for administrative e-leadership should incorporate. After narrowing the definition of e-leadership for operational and pragmatic purposes, the presentation provides a comparison of ICT-mediated e-leadership in three public sector settings, focusing on basic applied questions relating to the parameters of the scope and importance of e-leadership for facilitating, or frustrating, the creation of public value.
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Briefly, e-leadership is the use of virtual communication for a variety of organizational purposes such as leading subordinates, empowering teams, informing the organization and external communities, bringing people together to solve problems, aligning agendas and communities, etc. It contrasts with “traditional” communication-based leadership which focuses on the “old media” emphasizing face-to-face communications and voice-to-voice telephones for immediacy, and mail, printed communications (announcements, directives, statements, etc.), and hard-copy documents (e.g., memoranda, reports, and customized messages) for leadership-at-a-distance. It is important to note that leadership-at-a-distance has always been present, and it is not necessarily the case that leadership-at-a-distance is greater today. However, profoundly different is: (1) the number of “new media” and the bewildering concomitant types of those media, (2) the potential of new media to bring down the costs, increase quality, and provide enormous flexibility and choice, and (3) the vastly increased expectations but also difficulties in using ICTs effectively to communicate with individuals and groups, to provide appropriate feedback loops, and to solve problems and motivate people in virtual settings. Most leaders today have to be familiar with, and frequently use a variety of classes of ICTs such as: expanded telephony, email, instant messaging, social media, professional team spaces, document sharing, video conferencing, and video presentations (Van Wart et al. 2017).
This presentation provides a better base within the public sector administrative context. Broadly, it defines a pragmatic agenda suitable for administrative leadership as well as provides some important baseline observations on which to build propositions to test. The focus is on organizational settings, especially related to internal aspects such as the leader-follower dimension. More specifically, the presentation first addresses three overarching research questions based on definition, theory, and practice. Next, highlights of seven applied research questions are explored using three public sector case studies. Finally, based on the findings of these seven questions, a list of seven propositions regarding e-leadership are presented for further consideration.
