Business Horizons最新文献

The transformative impact of generative AI (GenAI), extending beyond traditional AI, raises numerous concerns including the replacement of human roles and AI misuse in an array of industries. This article introduces blockchain technology as a complementary technological safeguard to address some of these challenges. We emphasize blockchain’s role in promoting transparency, verifiability, and decentralization in AI development and usage, thereby offering potential solutions for four distinct challenges: (1) AI toxicity, biases, hallucinations, (2) AI interest misalignment, (3) AI as a black box, and (4) AI misuse. This article proposes ways to ensure responsible and transparent AI usage through the integration of blockchain. We position the convergence of AI and blockchain as a means to manage AI’s societal impact and unlock its benefits—contingent upon collaborative efforts among various stakeholders such as businesses, developers, and regulatory bodies. We contribute to the discourse on ethical AI usage and the potential of blockchain to enhance AI’s reliability and accountability for organizations.

Generative AI, particularly ChatGPT, creates new managerial concerns. This article addresses a crucial managerial challenge: While employees are including the tool as their private knowledge assistant in many aspects of their daily work, it is difficult for managers to see and understand the impact within their organization. There is more and more literature on what ChatGPT means for business, but we cannot say much as long as we are uninformed about its actual use. So, getting an insider’s perspective is needed to think about the consequences for organizations. The article is grounded in a qualitative study of employees’ experiences of interacting with ChatGPT among 50 early ChatGPT adopters. First, we show how employee-ChatGPT relations develop from private, experimental use into an integral part of knowledge work. Second, we identify six affordances: searching for information, brainstorming ideas, structuring content, writing a first draft, embellishing text, and proofing work. Further, we highlight three looming side effects of ChatGPT use that threaten knowledge ties, the quality of knowledge in organizations, and how work roles are configured. Accordingly, this article offers managers guidance in managing a ChatGPT-empowered workforce in a way that aims to mitigate these side effects while harnessing opportunities.

In the evolving digital landscape, organizations and leaders face increasing pressure to adopt and effectively utilize artificial intelligence (AI), which is steadily entering the management, work, and organizational ecosystems and enabling digital transformations. We observe AI-based applications assisting employees in daily tasks, project management, decision-making, and collaboration. But the successful adoption of AI is a complex and multifaceted process that requires careful consideration of various factors. What are the specific factors affecting the full adoption of AI from a multilevel viewpoint? This article presents a framework-based checklist concerning technology, organizations, and people (TOP) designed to assist digital leaders in navigating the challenges associated with AI adoption. Drawing upon extensive research and industry insights, this checklist provides digital leaders with a comprehensive tool to assess and address critical considerations during the adoption of AI. By systematically evaluating the technology, organization, and people dimensions, organizations and digital leaders can enhance their chances of a successful digital transformation and gain a competitive advantage in the digital age.

Digital transformation is imperative for companies wishing to remain competitive. Undeniably, the integration of digital technologies has proven fundamental for enhancing business performance. Despite this, little is known about how leadership styles influence the outcome of digital transformation processes. To address this gap, this study builds on the practice-based view (PBV) to explore how managers can lead these transformative processes. We interviewed 19 managers and employees from an Italian company, LEM Industries, to gather relevant insights about the phenomenon. The findings show how agile leaders drive successful digital transformation through fast decision loops, continuous participation in digital transformation activities, and evolutionary and revolutionary practices, making the organization leaner and more efficient. Agile leadership deployment made employees feel part of the broader decision-making process. Such a change increased their overall morale, as they began to feel part of the future of the company. Thus, agile leadership is an appropriate approach to engaging organizational members in digital transformation projects.

We live in a complex and hybrid world in which the digital and physical realms have never been so closely intertwined. Managerial practices are increasingly merging to give rise to more agile approaches that align with the world we inhabit. In this study, we explore the case of xFarm, a scaleup that has developed a unique form of digital leadership to manage the innovation process. This approach allows for the coexistence of both physical and digital dimensions. We identify the key drivers and specific practices that facilitate this hybrid approach. Digital leadership is thus defined as the ability to navigate such complexity and to adapt to the evolving needs of hybrid situations. This study offers three main takeaways that digital leaders can use to manage hybrid environments. These serve as reference points for setting a direction, while specific behaviors should be tailored to the particular field, in line with agile principles.

The democratization of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including ChatGPT, has sparked the interest of business practitioners given their ability to fundamentally change the way we work. While AI tools are positioned to augment human capabilities, their effective implementation requires the skill to understand where, when and how to best utilize them efficiently. Furthermore, meaningful engagement with the content produced by generative AI (GenAI) necessitates the intricacy of appropriate prompt engineering to optimize the learning process. As the field of GenAI continues to advance, the art of developing impactful prompts has become a necessary skill for harnessing its full potential. This research develops an AI prompting protocol through a constructivist theory lens. Based on the principles of constructivism, where individuals assimilate new knowledge by bridging it with their existing understanding, this research suggests an active engagement process in the human-AI co-construction of knowledge through GenAI. The goal is to empower business managers and their teams to construct effective AI prompts and validate responses, thereby enhancing user interaction, optimizing workflows, and maximizing the potential outcomes of AI chatbots.

To master a digital technology such as the metaverse, firms have to build and integrate new capabilities, while leaders have to comprehend the strategic factors ensuring this technology will translate into business success. Through a multiple-case study enriched by interviews with prominent experts in the field, we explore (1) how firms can build and integrate digital and organizational capabilities, and (2) what strategic factors leaders should consider as they develop digital business in the metaverse. Our results reveal that capabilities aimed at managing digital assets and at managing organizational factors are built and integrated through two specific mechanisms: organizational change and innovation ecosystems. Furthermore, we offer a three-stage roadmap and a leadership profile to assist with the metaverse transition. The findings enrich theoretical knowledge on the emerging topic of digital business in the metaverse.

Despite the flourishing literature on digital transformation (DT), there is still less research on the human side of DT—particularly on leaders’ competencies required to successfully trigger and drive organizational transformation in the context of the digital age. The human-centric approach and the leadership role are essential to understanding how organizations navigate DT by integrating digital-based knowledge. To understand the competencies necessary for a leader to drive organizational DT, this study combines and analyzes the results from a literature review on leadership styles and the findings from the semistructured interviews with 64 leaders of SMEs across a wide range of industries engaged in a DT journey. The analysis proposes the notion of transformative leadership to determine the capacity leaders must have to navigate organizational DT and identifies and describes the six competencies that distinguish a transformative leader.

Existing theory in the field of digital leadership describes many different skills that leaders need to possess to succeed in leading digitalization. By exploring existing theories and engaging qualitatively with leaders in practice, this article identifies a gap between the skills the theory dictates leaders should possess and the skills leaders possess in practice. In practice, the number of skills required and the complexity of digital leadership cause leaders to perceive the acquisition of the necessary skill set as unmanageable. By engaging phenomenologically with the fact that one cannot know what one does not know, this article shows how digital leadership skills can be learned and developed. Combining phenomenological concepts like common sense, a reference frame, and being a stranger with competence development theory reveals a way that leaders can indeed develop their digital leadership and their competencies, although the competencies of each digital leader will be unique. Furthermore, leading digitalization is shown to start at the intrapersonal level, in part because of the importance of authenticity in leadership practice. The overall aim of the article is to explore, through a phenomenological learning process, how digital leadership can be developed.