Leadership styles and E-commerce adoption : An analysis of Thai food exporters

Abstract: Being an effective leader in today business environment is a challenged task. The world has shifted to the digital era where social and business structures are rapidly changed. The trend of globalization forces all leaders to regularly learn more on what was changed and what is being changed. Today, companies that already adapt new business concept probably have a better application that satisfy more customers than companies that work in the old manner. What is work in the past is probably obsolete in today. One of the popular issues during the last two decades is the phenomenon of e-commerce. How leader reacts with the trend of ecommerce is primary purpose of this study. It is said that the way leader acts and behaves will directly affect company performance. This study explores the association between leadership styles and e-commerce adoption. The purposes of the study are to identify the type of leadership styles in associated with the level of e-commerce adoption and to measure that attitude of the leaders toward employing ecommerce. The study was conducted in Thailand and emphasized in exporting industry. Three hundred Thai food companies were systematically selected. Self-administered questionnaires were mailed to those companies. The response rate was 70.67% Hypothesis was developed and tested with statistical significant level of 0.05. A Pearson chisquare test supported that there was a difference in e-commerce adoption between leadership styles. By using regression analysis, the study found two factors influenced the level of ecommerce adoption: type of leadership style and number of employees. The finding indicated that most managers were medium shared leadership style which inclined to task concern rather than people concern. The majority of companies have already adopted e-commerce into their business. The result showed that most of them were in the level of information based e-commerce. Leaders who have high shared leadership tend to have a higher level of e-commerce adoption than other two types of leadership. It would therefore seem that the leaders who are high in both task and people concern would be early adopters in e-commerce. Most managers had positive attitude toward e-commerce. They agreed and accepted the advantages of employing e-commerce into their business. The attitudes they had were ecommerce can generally help the firm increases profit, reduces operating costs, quickly expands business globally, fast communicates with customers, and improves its image.