New traits to open up the gates: What traits and activities does leadership in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need to drive digitalization?

Abstract

The purpose of this research work is to create an overall picture of the leadership traits and activities that have been recognized in recent literature as necessary to promote and support digitalization in SMEs. Furthermore, this research work also aims to review the overall picture created for completeness and to identify any research gaps. The chosen research methodology follows in its approach a systematic literature analysis. The findings of this research lead to an overall view of the most important traits and activities of leadership to promote and support the digitalization process in SMEs. Moreover, this work also leads to the assumption that the topic of trust has been insufficiently considered in the literature studied, both in terms of traits and activities. The limitations of this research work are mainly justified by the chosen research methodology, but also by the fact that the literature analysis was conducted only on the basis of one literature database. The value of this research work lies in particular in the fact that an overall view of the traits and activities of leadership has been created from the recent literature. This overall view can serve as a basis for future research projects. In addition, the topic of trust was identified as an important aspect that should encourage future research to examine this aspect more deeply in the context of leadership traits and activities to positively influence digitalization development in SMEs.