Chapter 3: Pressing on into the Era of the Digital Organization: A Mental Journey of Leadership and Management Consulting

As we continue to press on into the era of the digital organization, how we conceptualize various constructs in the field of organization and management studies needs to be re-examined. Case in point: how scholars conceptualize leadership is much different today than how it was intellectualized in the industrial age, and consequently, how management consultants practice leadership consulting is much different today than how it was performed in previous eras. To explore how the construct of leadership may be changing and how management consultants are dealing with this difference in a period of widespread technology advancement, we conducted a thought experiment, an imaginative exercise conducted in our heads to create and manipulate mental models to explore changes in conceptual schemes. Our thought experiment revealed that digitalization may prompt a conceptualization of leadership as a paradox that comprises a tension between established, functional, person-based forms of leadership and emerging, process-based, conceptualizations. Based on our rendering of leadership, we suggest concrete practices for management consultants to help their clients adopt a paradoxical mindset, an outlook that opens a whole new world of debate about contradictions between interdependent elements in organizations.