The Leadership Quarterly 30 (2019) I–II
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
The Leadership Quarterly
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/leaqua
Special Issue: Call for Papers
Leadership in the Digital Era: Social Media, Big Data, Virtual Reality,
Computational Methods, and Deep Learning
⁎
George C. Banksa, , Shelley D. Dionneb, Hiroki Sayamab, Marianne Schmid Mastc
a
University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA
b
Binghamton University, Binghamton, USA
c
University of Lausanne, Switzerland
The study of leadership has always evolved, but this is truer than
ever before as we transition into the 21st century (Dinh et al. 2014). The
rapid evolution in the study of leadership reflects real world realities in
geopolitical and institutional change and in particular, the advance-
ment of technology (Kremer, 1993). Hence, we have now entered into a
digital era in which leadership itself has changed as well as the means
through which we study it.
To date, studies from various disciplines have contributed to our
understanding of leadership in the digital era. These contributions have
varied from theoretical and practical contributions to methodological
advances in the means through which leadership is studied, including
close versus distant leadership (Shamir, 1995). In management and
applied psychology, research has explored how various forms of lea-
dership facilitate group performance across different types of electronic
media (Raghuram, Hill, Gibbs, & Maruping, 2018). Such research has
quite a history in various domains, even leadership. For example, ex-
perimental work has investigated the effectiveness of leadership in face-
to-face, desktop videoconferencing, or text-based chatting (Hambley,
O’Neill, & Kline, 2007; Sosik, 1997). However, this research has not
been leveraged sufficiently to better understand the various facets of
leadership as a phenomenon.
Advancements have also happened beyond the management and
applied psychology fields. As early as the mid-1990s, computer simula-
tions illustrated how bias in performance evaluations adversely affected
females as they advanced in leadership pipelines (Martell, Lane, &
Emrich, 1996). In political science, novel research has shed light on how
politicians have been able to influence their constituents and vice versa
via conversations on social media (Barbera et al. 2014). Powered by
machine learning and deep learning in particular (LeCun, Bengio, &
Hinton, 2015), advancements in computer science, such as social sensing
(e.g., analysis of emotional and behavioral cues) and natural language
processing, have grown in popularity. For instance, we have gained an
understanding of how algorithms can give bosses insight into how their
employees are feeling (Waddell, 2016) and research has explored how
automatically sensed behavior can predict job performance (Schmid
Mast, Gatica-Perez, Frauendorfer, Nguyen, & Choudhury, 2015).
⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: gbanks3@uncc.edu (G.C. Banks).
https://doi.org/10.1016/S1048-9843(19)30427-8
Other fields, such as biology (Gavrilets, Auerbach, & Van Vugt,
2016; Powers & Lehmann, 2014) have also simulated models to study
topics such as leader emergence (see also Edelson, Polania, Ruff, Fehr,
& Hare, 2018). In addition, gene-culture coevolution has long relied on
models and experiments to examine the hypothesis that humans have
evolved both to defer to and to learn from successful, prestigious in-
dividuals (Henrich & Gil-White, 2001; Henrich, 2015). The significance
of this idea in contemporary leadership studies awaits analysis via
computational methods. Economics uses computer mediated experi-
ments to allow for strategic interactions, and clean experimental tests,
among players in various social interactions relevant to leadership (for
a review see Zehnder, Herz, & Bondardi, 2017). Moreover, the era of big
data is upon us, which brings many opportunities and challenges
(Wenzel & Van Quaquebeke 2018). By using big data and insights from
genetics, pretty soon we will be able to have “as-if” randomized designs
harnessing the exogeneity of gene single-nucleotide polymorphism to
estimate the causal effect of a phenotype (e.g., intelligence, personality)
on outcomes like leadership effectiveness (e.g., see DiPrete, Burik, &
Koellinger, 2018; von Hinke, Smith, Lawlor, Propper, & Windmeijer,
2016). The pace of developments in machine learning is such that
today, computer algorithms can quickly achieve super-human skills in
complex-decision making domains on the basis of first principles and
using only self-reinforced learning (Silver et al., 2018). How can such
insights be used to better understand leadership?
Despite the advancements listed above, several questions remain
unanswered that provide exciting challenges to be addressed with fu-
ture research. For instance, how has the introduction of social media
provided new opportunities to study leader-follower exchange re-
lationships? In what ways can deep learning be applied to advance our
approaches to leadership evaluation? How can artificial intelligence be
used to develop leadership skills?
Topics that we will consider for the special issue, include, but are
not limited to the following:
1. Formal and informal leadership via various digital means, such as
social media.
G.C. Banks et al.
2. Use of computational social sensing to provide greater insight into
responses of leadership behaviors.
3. Application of technology (e.g., deep learning) for leader evalua-
tion (non-verbal, verbal, appearance), psychometric testing, and
leader development.
4. The generalization of face-to-face (i.e., close) models of leadership
generalize to virtual contexts.
5. Harnessing big data from demographic, psychological, behavioral,
or genetic levels, to apply to models of leadership.
6. Application of nature- or theory-inspired computational models of
leadership (e.g., agent-based simulations) to better the leadership
process or how leadership evolves over time.
7. Use of technological innovations (e.g., virtual reality, automated
coaching, etc.) to advance leadership training.
8. Exploiting technology and big data in the context of “natural ex-
periments” (e.g., exogenous shocks, legal interventions) in the
study of leadership.
9. Examining whether evolved social cognition privileges the trans-
mission of information available to leaders, and how this link may
drive social dynamics and cultural evolution
10. Methodological how-to guides concerning the study of leadership
in the digital era.
Summary
In this special issue, we would like to see the application of rig-
orous scientific standards to the study of leadership in the digital era.
We intend to publish theoretical and empirical manuscripts, as well
as reviews or critiques that will advance our understanding of lea-
dership in the digital era. Specifically, we are interested in research
that will help inform basic or applied research and consequently
impact policy. In addition to management and psychology research
on leadership, we welcome scholarship from other fields including
biology, anthropology, computer science, economics, political sci-
ence, and sociology, among others. Key to success in the submission
process is to ensure clear theorizing and operationalization, and,
where relevant, well-justified causal claims for empirical papers;
creative measurement and designs will be especially welcomed (see
Antonakis 2017, pp. 11-16).
Submission Process
Authors can submit their manuscripts starting from 4 September
2019 but no later than the submission deadline of 18 October 2019 (by
15h00 European Central Time), online via The Leadership Quarterly’s
EVISE submission system at https://www.evise.com/profile/#/
LEAQUA/login
To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified for con-
sideration for this Special Issue, it is important that authors select “SI:
Digital” when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission
process. Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with The
Leadership Quarterly’s Guide for Authors available on the journal web
page. All submitted manuscripts will be subject to The Leadership
Quarterly’s double blind review process.
II
The Leadership Quarterly 30 (2019)I–II
Research Data
Research data forms the backbone of research articles and provides
the foundation on which knowledge is built. Researchers are increas-
ingly encouraged, or even mandated, to make research data available,
accessible, discoverable and usable. Although not mandatory, the
journal encourages authors to submit their data at the same time as
their manuscript. Further information can be found at: https://www.
elsevier.com/authors/author-services/research-data
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Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4(1), 153–181.