LEPJ

Call for Papers

About the topic: 

Leadership in a Digital World Worldwide all aspects of life and all businesses are strongly influenced by technological changes that come with digitalization (Colbert, Yee, & George, 2016). These changes cause the need for massive transformational processes in order to make society and the economy ready for future developments. To handle the challenges, “management” is not sufficient, whereas “leadership” gains in importance. Hinterhuber and Friedrich (2002) define the task of a manager to optimize existing processes and systems, while the task of a leader is to invent the future and to inspire people to achieve challenging goals.

To cope with the complex tasks which accompany the vast changes, the development of a digitalization strategy, including the implementation of digital tools and processes, is indispensable. Therefore, far more is necessary than simply hiring a Chief Digitalization Officer (Doonan, 2018). The required innovations have to be generated “on all managerial levels of an agile organization” (Steude, 2017) and especially the formal managers – or leaders – have to adapt to accompanying rapid changes as well as actively shape the future. 

Once the organization becomes aware of the necessity to go digital (Westerman, Bonnet, & McAfee, 2014), the leaders face the challenge of processing the huge amounts of data that comes with digitalization. While in former times decisions have been made with a lack of important information, nowadays the contrary is the case: decisions must be made under conditions of information overload (Van Knippenberg, Dahlander, Haas, & George, 2015). To manage the immense quantity of data, the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is needed (Steude, 2017). The term AI was first mentioned about 60 years ago and its development took until today to create potent cognitive computing concepts and applications (IBM’s Watson computer) (Kelly III, 2015) and the end has not yet come. 

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence will change the whole working environment, which partially leads to public anxiety about AI, that tends to be overreactive (Bryson and Kime, 2011). Mainzer (2018) states that AI-based automatization does not cause unemployment; AI will reduce costs of production and thereby foster the job market for qualified employees. But in fact, AI will in some degree, for example, substitute the routine work of white-collar employees (Frey & Osborne, 2013) while work that is highly complex is not that likely to be automated by computers (Bresnahan, Brynjolfsson, & Hitt, 2002) which additionally is the case for creative and strategic tasks. 

Besides the opportunities of AI, which must be evaluated on ethical aspects (Yu et al., 2018), the digital transformation changes the way we work on a more general level concerning new technologies: Virtual teams nowadays play an important role and alternative solutions to traditional work environment are of interest. These changes require a reflection on more relevant leadership competencies, that could address the challenges brought by digitalization (Faix & Mergenthaler, 2015; Faix, Kisgen, & Mergenthaler, 2018; Kisgen, 2017), such as being able to lead from a distance (Schwarzmüller, Brosi, Duman, & Welpe, 2018). This, for example, is needed to find a replacement for informal conversations in the hallway or while fetching a cup of coffee. To date, only some large corporations if any, have found solutions to cope with these altered circumstances. Another important technological development are Augmented Reality applications, that support employees in fulfilling their tasks such as manufacturing assembly, equipment maintenance, and procedural learning (Tang, Owen, Biocca, & Mou, 2003). This may be advantageous in many situations but likewise, leaders must be aware of the immense change of work design that may lead to challenges or problems. 

Although digitalization has enormous influence on our lives, the current research situation is, that there is still fairly little knowledge about the connections between digital transformation, leadership and work design (Parker, Van den Broeck, & Holman, 2017). Therefore, the special issue of “Leadership, Education, Personality: An Interdisciplinary Journal” and its 1st Symposium focus on the topic ‘Leadership in a Digital World’ and seek contributions to the knowledge and professional practice of this field. Research that sheds light on this area is welcome, e.g. topics dealing with but not limited to the following: 

• Leadership in a Digital World 

• Leadership education

 • Leader personality and competencies for the digital era

 • Smart working and agile organizations

 • Effects of digitalization on the society

 • Ethical views on digitalization and AI and leadership requirements • Leadership, AI and sustainability 

• General effects of digitalization on leadership and of leadership on digitalization 

• Education of leaders to handle the challenges of digital transformation and complexity 

• Digital workplaces and its employees • Decision making of leaders within the knowledge-based society

• Effective Leadership in virtual or face-to-face teams 

• Leadership and Quantum Computing 

As the digital transformation compromises all areas of life, we highly welcome submissions from all scientific fields to pursue the interdisciplinary approach. Articles from basic research as well as from applied research with a transfer-oriented concept can be submitted without limitation concerning methodological procedures. 

Submissions: 

The symposium is associated with a special issue of the Springer journal “Leadership, Education, Personality: An Interdisciplinary Journal” and there are two opportunities for submission: 

1. Full scientific papers: The papers will be published as open access publication to reach a wide readership within the excellent network of Springer Nature. The submission is free of charge. Based on your submitted paper, you may be invited to present your work during the symposium. Please submit your research via the Springer tool Editorialmanager as described on www.springer.com/42681, where you can find the instructions for authors. You need to select the topic ‘Leadership in a Digital World’ to match your research to this issue. 
2. Extended abstracts for presentations and posters: The abstract should be of no more than 1,500 words (including references) and should include details whether you want to have a presentation or a poster. The individual 20-minute presentations consist of 15-minute presentations and 5 additional minutes for discussion. Please indicate if you are willing to present your material as a poster if it is not accepted for a presentation. Poster sessions will occur at scheduled times, with the authors present to discuss their work. The best poster will be awarded by the participants of the symposium. For all posters and presentations, a submission of a full research paper, subsequent to the symposium, would be appreciated.  Please send your abstract to Mrs. Liane Windisch (lepj@steinbeis-sibe.de). So that proposals can be blind reviewed, author identifying information is not to appear within the proposal document or in the saved file name. 

Papers and abstracts must be submitted in English by 15th August 2019 and will be double-blind reviewed. 

Authors will be notified of acceptance or invitation for presentation or poster session by 27th September 2019. 

Symposium Participation: 

The symposium will take place on 22nd November 2019 in Stuttgart, Germany. Conference venue will be the ‘Haus der Wirtschaft’. 

Further details on the logistics of the symposium will be published on the web www.steinbeis-sibe.de/lepj-sym... where you can sign up for participation starting from 17th June 2019. 

The official languages of the symposium are English and German. Simultaneous translation service to English will be provided for presentations in German. As the Steinbeis foundation is sponsor of this event, there will be no participation fee for the first symposium. 

Please note that we cannot offer travel allowance. For any inquiries you may have, please contact Mrs. Liane Windisch (lepj@steinbeis-sibe.de, +49/7032 94 58 92). 

References: 

Bresnahan, T., Brynjolfsson, E., & Hitt, L. (2002). Information technology, workplace organization, and the demand for skilled labor: Firm-level evidence. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117, 339-376. 

Bryson, J. J., Kime, P. P., & Zurich, C. (2011). Just an artifact: Why machines are perceived as moral agents. In IJ-CAI proceedings - International joint conference on artificial intelligence (Vol. 22, p. 1641). 

Colbert, A., Yee, N., & George, G. (2016). The digital workforce and the workplace of the future. Academy of Management Journal : AMJ, 59(3), 731-739. 

Doonan, M. (2018). So you've just hired a killer chief digital officer - now what? Strategic HR Review, 17(1), 17-22. 

Faix, W. G., Kisgen, S., Mergenthaler, J. (2018). Leadership. Persönlichkeit. Innovation. Bildung und Forschung an der SIBE. Stuttgart: Steinbeis-Edition. 

Faix, W. G., Mergenthaler, J. (2015). The Creative Power of Education: on the formation of a creative personality as the fundamental condition for innovation and entrepreneurial success. Stuttgart: Steinbeis-Edition. 

Frey, C. B. & Osborne, M. A. (2017). The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerization? Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 114, 254-280.

Hinterhuber, H., Friedrich, S. (2002). The technology dimension of strategic leadership: The leadership challenge for production economists. International Journal of Production Economics, 77(3), pp.191–203. 

Kelly III, J. E. (2015). Computing, Cognition and the Future of Knowing, IBM Corp. NY 10589. 

Kisgen, S. (2017). The Future of Business Leadership Education in Tertiary Education for Graduates. Stuttgart: Steinbeis-Edition. 

Mainzer, K. (2016). Künstliche Intelligenz – Wann übernehmen die Maschinen? Heidelberg: Springer. 

Parker, S. K., Van den Broeck, A., & Holman, D. (2017). Work design influences: A synthesis of multilevel factors that affect the design of jobs. Academy of Management Annals, 11, 267-308. 

Schwarzmüller, Tanja & Brosi, Prisca & Duman, Denis & Welpe, Isabell. (2018). How Does the Digital Transformation Affect Organizations? Key Themes of Change in Work Design and Leadership. management revu. 29. 114-138. 10.5771/0935-9915-2018-2-114. 

Sikora, H. (2017). Digital Age Management: Führung Im Digitalen Zeitalter. E & I Elektrotechnik Und Informationstechnik 134.7: 344-48.

Steude, D. H. (2017). Change and Innovation Leadership in an Industrial Digital Environment. Organizacijų Vadyba: Sisteminiai Tyrimai, 78(1), 95-107. 

Tang, A., Owen, C., Biocca, F. & Mou, W. (2003). Comparative effectiveness of augmented reality in object assembly. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 73-80). ACM. 

van Knippenberg, D., Dahlander, L., Haas, M., George, G. (2015). Information, Attention, and Decision Making: From the Editors. Academy of Management Journal. 58, (3), 649-657. Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business. 

Westerman, G., Bonnet, D., & McAfee, A. (2014). Leading digital: Turning technology into business transformation. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

Yu, H., Shen, Z., Miao, C., Leung, C., Lesser, V., & Yang, Q. (2018). Building Ethics into Artificial Intelligence. in Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'18), pp. 5527-5533, 2018.