Chapter 7: Fostering a Sustainable Future: The Role of Digital Leadership in Cultivating an SDG-Oriented Organisational Culture

The continuous evolution of digital technologies has changed the very nature of contemporary organisations. Today, the aforementioned transformation has had a radical impact on how organisations operate and communicate with each other to compete for market share (Westerman et al., 2014). The digital revolution has introduced an era of new leadership and organisational culture, thus shifting away from the traditional mode to fit with the emerging demands inherent in this modern age (Bharadwaj et al., 2013).

In fact, most leadership pre-digitally was hierarchical; every top-down decision that the leadership of an organisation made was grounded in experience and intuition. But then there came digital technologies, which democratised information across boards and empowered all employees (Dittes et al., 2019). Hence, most approaches towards leadership today are jointly collaborative and inclusive. Nowadays, leaders must negotiate the challenges of a digital ecosystem, develop and deploy diverse and dispersed teams, and then exploit the power of technology with the view to fostering innovation and growth (Cortellazzo et al., 2019). This, therefore, sets a new paradigm that brings into relevance the concept of digital leadership, centred on leading and managing within a technology-saturated environment.