Leadership styles effect by traditional organizations and the relation with job satisfaction during digital transformation

Abstract

The biggest challenge of the new era is the continued changes to the environment of an organization. The rapid progression of digital technologies, the new management methods, daily servicing issues within the organizations, often reviews of existing compliance or regulation rules and introduction of new, are only few of the factors that organizations face every day. With all those changes every day within the organizations, management must find ways for rescheduling and replanning the strategy in such a way that would ensure that company achieve the milestones and the same time priority issues are handled, customers servicing experience remain high, and they allow a work balance for their employees to keep them satisfied, motivated, productive, and efficient. Study will focus on the Digital Transformation effects within Banking Industry in Cyprus, and how the changes in the working environment affect the job satisfaction of the employees in terms of the working environment, the relationship with the other colleagues and the attention they receive by their leaders to help them grow and adjust the changes. Understanding the effects of the Digital Transformation and indicating possible solutions to the organization for improving their employees working experience, it is necessary applying a research on Digital Transformation definition, review the main leadership styles as recorded over the years, list the main characteristics and target of each style and examining the main theories published to explain and identify the factors that allow organizations measuring employees job satisfaction. Study following the literature review regarding the aspects described previously, would apply a quantitative method survey, with candidate responders the employees of one of the larger organizations in Cyprus serving Banking industry. Questionnaire includes closed-end answers that follows a five-point Likert scale. Results shows that employees in Banking Industry in Cyprus welcome the technological changes, in some cases they already adopted them and benefited from the automations that make their work life easier. They presented in general as satisfied employees by the working environment, their teammates, and the management. Respect, communication, feeling of accomplishment and belonging, work life balance, stability, and safety along with the good relationships with the teammates and the management, have been identified as the factors that allow the employees feel happy and satisfied by their work. Regardless the high satisfaction results and the warm welcome attitude against the Digital transformation, employees’ express concerns that digitalization would lead to reducing the human staff, to voluntary retirement and devaluation of elder people due to their inability to adjust the new technologies. Employees seems to adopt the changes, however, the same time they feel unsecure about their job’s future. Finally, the salary level and opportunities to progress and grow are two other factors that organization should focus on, since responders’ answers shows that they do not follow their expectations.