Leadership and digital transformation in the construction industry: a qualitative exploration of leadership practices

Paper in proceeding, 2024

The construction industry's digital transformation renders consequences that are hard to predict and how new need for leadership evolve. Here, the construction management literature prescribes functionalistic views, while how managers cope with the technology-intense context in their leadership is missing. Exploring this problem, the paper focus managers everyday leadership in the practiced digitalisation of various construction operations. We conduct interviews with nine managers respectively during three years in the construction industry in Sweden, Preliminary findings from the initial two rounds of interviews (n=14) indicate that the Swedish culture gives rise to ineffective practices with 'nagging', 'ethical manipulation' and 'seeking consensus' in managers' attempts to lead digitalisation. This begins to reveal insights regarding contextual influence on everyday leadership practices associated with digital transformation in the construction industry.