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ABSTRACT
This paper discusses and examines e-leadership practices, more specifically, what skills leaders need and what challenges they encounter in the new e-context of business management. Digitalized business world transforms remarkably the context of leading where e-relationships become more and more common in technology-aided management. This change challenges daily leadership work as to social skills and forms of interaction. Trust and trust-building is a necessary resource, intangible asset and skill as a foundation for collaborative actions in organizations and their leadership. This article is about studying e-leaders' views of the new e-leadership context focusing especially on trust-building in followers. The paper presents new findings from qualitative study not explicitly reported in the prior empirical studies of e-leaders. A case study was made interviewing leaders from five large organizations in Finland. The findings show that the e-leaders' changing work context is not yet well recognized and is poorly understood and supported by supervisors and managers in the organizations involved in the study. Key findings are discussed more widely and implications made to practicing leaders in today's e-world.
Introduction
Fast-developing technology transforms leadership work and the ways of interaction in workplace relationships. This change challenges leaders' competences and skills development in organizations. Today trust-building belongs to key leadership skills (Yukl, 2010). Trust in organizations has become an increasingly important issue in both academic research and management practice due to major change and increasing needs for collaborative actions in business life. Trust forms a foundation for cooperation and has been examined more extensively in the management and organization research field during the last two decades or so. This paper focuses on studying trust-building from leaders' perspective in e-business management context. E-leading practices are still scarcely studied empirically. E-leadership is a fairly new concept launched in the new millennium. Management researchers have begun to use the concept to identify and understand changing leadership practices towards technology-aided ways of managing organizations. According to Avolio and Kahai (2003), the term eleadership refers to leading people mainly through IT-mediated and supported interaction. Technology-mediated leadership (TML) is characterized by the geographical distance between the leader and follower (distant leading), or by work methods such as electronic information sharing. New ways of working and skills for interacting are needed in the digitizing...