A Human Touch in A Digitalized Business World : A Qualitative Study of How the Digital Transformation in Business Impacts the Emotional Interactions Between Leaders and Followers

Abstract: Due to today’s digital transformation, traditional ways of communication are increasingly replaced by virtual and digital communication channels. The challenge for leaders in this digital environment is consequently to reach out to their followers to the same extent as in physical meetings. Leadership is about influencing people to strive towards a desired direction and leaders’ aims are thereby to impact their followers both cognitively but also emotionally in order to stimulate motivation. Emotional intelligence revolves around the necessity of understanding and reading others’ emotions and how to act upon that in order to successfully interact with others. By reason of the current Covid-19 pandemic, we have the rare opportunity to explore the interaction between leaders and followers during the time of a global pandemic and understand how the accompanying social distance may impact the emotional aspects in leadership. The research question for this thesis is thereby: How can emotional value be created in the interaction between leaders and followers in today's digitalized world? The theoretical framework that constitutes the basis of the thesis is divided into four main concepts which are: the relational perspective of leadership, emotional intelligence, creating emotional value and the digital transformation in the business world. The study has an exploratory purpose and is of a qualitative approach. In order to collect empirical data, semi-structured interviews were held with eight participants whereof four leaders and four followers. The findings could be divided into four themes which are: Human touch and individual need, Social skills and individual adaptation, Work satisfaction and motivation and Future strategies. The result of the study shows that emotional value is highly important in the interaction between leaders and followers in order to maintain engagement, satisfaction and motivation in a digital work environment. The conclusion is however that emotional value indeed can be created through digital communication but that it has to be created in a quite different way than in physical meetings.