Leadership for Digital Working: Towards a Contextual Ambidextrous Approach

This chapter focuses on Smart Working (SW) adoption and its related leadership styles. We particularly aim at understanding how SW adoption requires an ambidextrous approach based both on directive and empowering leadership. Our theoretical framework, particularly, contextualizes the leadership approach by highlighting that within such blended context (off-site and on-site working mode), leadership should be ambidextrous, according to the specific working mode and, therefore, according to the opposite related dynamics, such as autonomy vs. control or task vs. objectives focus. The model, moreover, focuses on the importance of enabling an approach that implies new relational skills (or new combination of such skills) both for the leaders and the workers that, regarding their remote or physically approach, should evaluate to be more or less directive (or empowering). However, other contingencies should be analysed in order to have a deeper view for a successful SW adoption. Leaders and followers, therefore, need to be cognizant and aware about such contingent approach that claims for their flexibility and variety of behaviors, and they should develop, accordingly, a related behavioral repertoire. This contribution, by proposing a more complete and complex approach for SW adoption based on ambidextrous leadership, offers an original point of view that highlights the importance of balancing both directive and empowering leadership styles within a SW context.