The new way of leadership. Characteristics of future leaders based on a netnography research

Abstract

In today’s ever-changing world, digitalisation has a powerful impact on leadership. In our research, we focus on how leaders can lead in each situation by letting go of the classic “how to do it well” guiding principle, and instead listen and feel the situation, as well as rely on their own self-awareness and the quality of their team and collaboration. This study aims to identify the characteristics that leaders should adopt to succeed in a world of continuous change. Aiming to identify which character traits are most important, both in practice and in literature, we employed systematic literature review and netnography to answer this question. The systematic review revealed five recent leadership style models, which highlight different aspects of leadership styles and categories of leaders. For netnography, anonymous employee evaluations of six international companies were analysed. The two methodological tools converged in a synthesis of concepts, where the partial results of each method were analysed. The study identified four salient traits that are important for a manager to adopt in an ever-changing environment. These essential traits for a future leader are resilience, innovation, responsiveness to people and self-awareness. These characteristics will help leaders to better respond to the changing world’s challenges. The added value of this study is that it highlights four leader characteristics of great importance in theory and practice and draws attention to the importance of self-awareness in leadership.