Abstract:

In recent years we have observed an increased adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) to support business management activities, namely for team management and collaboration. This has led to substantial transformations in the way individuals or groups interact in the work environment, enabling the intensification of synchronous interactions and collaboration among individuals and teams who are geographically disperse. Such changing work environments create new challenges for the leadership function that needs to evolve from a prevalent face-to-face setting, to remote models of collaboration. This has led to the emergence of a new dimension for management knowledge commonly labelled as E-leadership, referring to the process of influencing the change of attitudes, feelings, ways of thinking, performance and behaviour of people, groups of individuals and organizations through the use of ICT (Bowdish et al., 2021). E-leadership has received increased attention with the advent of the Covid 19 pandemics, and the rapid operational transformation in organisations as a result of the global expansion of remote work. This article offers a contribution to the advancement of the management knowledge on E-leadership building on a bibliometric analysis of articles indexed in the Scopus collections with the thematic E-leadership, as far as 2022. The advanced search of the term E-leadership lead to the retrieval of 275 documents result, which forms the database for the analysis. From the outset, it can be inferred that the subject e-leadership has been presented in the literature since the year 2000 and the publications on the issue have grown since then. The interest in the area have increased along the years, with a surge in the past 3 years with 88 publications from the year 2019. The article offers a characterization of the E-leadership function, its domains of competence and challenges, allowing for the advancement of a research agenda in the field.

Keywords:

Leadership, e-leadership, remote work, virtual team.