e-Leadership through strategic alignment: an empirical study of small- and medium-sized enterprises in the digital age

By Weizi Li, Kecheng Liu, Maksim Belitski, Abby Ghobadian, Nicholas O'Regan. Journal of Information and Technology, 2016

306 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in the European economy. A critical challenge faced by SME leaders, as a consequence of the continuing digital technology revolution, is how to optimally align business strategy with digital technology to fully leverage the potential offered by these technologies in pursuit of longevity and growth. There is a paucity of empirical research examining how e-leadership in SMEs drives successful alignment between business strategy and digital technology fostering longevity and growth. To address this gap, in this paper we develop an empirically derived e-leadership model. Initially we develop a theoretical model of e-leadership drawing on strategic alignment theory. This provides a theoretical foundation on how SMEs can harness digital technology in support of their business strategy enabling sustainable growth. An in-depth empirical study was undertaken interviewing 42 successful European SME leaders to validate, advance and substantiate our theoretically driven model. The outcome of the two stage process – inductive development of a theoretically driven e-leadership model and deductive advancement to develop a complete model through in-depth interviews with successful European SME leaders – is an e-leadership model with specific constructs fostering effective strategic alignment. The resulting diagnostic model enables SME decision makers to exercise effective e-leadership by creating productive alignment between business strategy and digital technology improving longevity and growth prospects.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cb8e66acab8f037ef8a099190fe9a55cfb6e6f69

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Citations in the corpus

Unpacking the Difference Between Digital Transformation and IT-Enabled Organizational Transformation (2021, unknown): “, 2013; Vial, 2019) in ways that organizations should address (Li et al., 2016; Matt et al., 2015; Yeow, Soh, & Hansen, 2018).”
The industrial management of SMEs in the era of Industry 4.0 (2018, background): “The future of SMEs, which are major contributors to most industries and countries (Li et al. 2016), depends largely on their capacity to respond to their clients’ expectations while maintaining a competitive advantage on their market.”
Mastering digital transformation: The nexus between leadership, agility, and digital strategy (2022, background): “Therefore, organizations need to seek leaders who have the transformational leadership abilities to digitally transform their operations to stay relevant and compete in the Industry 4.0 era (Li et al., 2016; Porfírio et al., 2021).”
How entrepreneurial SMEs compete through digital platforms: The roles of digital platform capability, network capability and ambidexterity (2019, background): “The literature stresses that alignment between a firm's organizational orientation and that firm's digital strategy is necessary for success (Li et al., 2016; Tiwana, 2014; Wan et al., 2017; Yeow et al., 2018).”