What does "digital leadership" measure?
Digital leadership appears on 17 recent papers and leadership keywords on almost 300, and 70 leadership papers carry a digital or AI keyword. New leadership constructs keep appearing, each with its own survey scale. Is digital leadership something new, or transformational leadership measured with new words?
What prompted this
Since October 2025, 296 papers carry a leadership keyword (184 in management journals), among them "leadership" on 26, "women in leadership" on 23, "digital leadership" on 17, "ethical leadership" on 14 and "strategic leadership" on 12. Seventy of them also carry a digital or AI keyword (digital transformation 26, digital leadership 17). Like the technology acceptance model, the leadership scales are mostly measured with employee surveys.
Questions
- How strongly do digital leadership scores correlate with transformational leadership scores for the same leaders, and does digital leadership predict anything once transformational leadership is controlled for?
- Do the outcomes digital leadership is said to drive (digital transformation, innovation) show up in data other than the same survey?
- How many different "digital leadership" scales are in use, and do they agree?
Data that could help
Survey datasets that include several leadership scales, the published scales themselves, and firm outcomes from outside the survey (patents, IT spending, digital revenue).
Next step
Collect the item wording of every digital leadership scale used since 2020 and compare it item by item with standard transformational leadership scales.