Executive Leadership Lessons & Opportunities for Business Technology Innovation

The Relationship Between Chief Information Officer Transformational Leadership & Computing Platform Operating Systems

By: George Anderson

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 5 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

The purpose of this study was to relate the strength of Chief Information Officer (CIO) transformational leadership behaviors to innovation in the form of the computing platforms selected for a firm’s critical business applications. At their inception, nearly all computing platforms are seen as innovative. Over time, though, innovative platforms naturally become outdated as they give way to a new crop of more contemporary, capable, and agile business-enabling platforms. Firms that embrace platform innovations may reap benefits related to business agility, but those same firms can also incur significant risks related to system downtime, poor user experience, and poor customer satisfaction. *** Research suggests that executive leadership should affect the degree to which IT innovation is embraced or avoided, and IT executives hold the greatest opportunity to influence such innovation outcomes. Yet no prior research explained the relationship between a CIO’s specific leadership behaviors and how those behaviors affected choices in technology platforms selected for a firm's critical business applications. *** This literature gap was and still remains important because innovative computing platforms influence a firm’s competitiveness, IT cost structure, and most importantly the firm's ability to positively affect its business performance. Research questions explored in this paper asked to what extent transformational leadership theory and its subcomponents (independent variables) predict the selection of more or less innovative OSs (dependent variables). Using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire and 17 additional items, data representing evaluations of 151 randomly selected North American CIOs and their ERP computing platforms were studied using a theoretical framework incorporating the influence of executive-level leadership on technology innovation. *** Through analysis of variance, t tests, descriptive statistics, and more (covered in Chapters 3 and 4), the study uncovered significant relationships between the strength of a number of transformational leadership behaviors, particularly Intellectual Stimulation and Inspirational Motivation, and the platform selected for a firm’s ERP business system. *** Detailed in Chapter 5, implications for business and social change include a clearer understanding of how specific executive-level leadership behaviors may encourage IT workplace innovation, enable IT teams to more effectively meet changing business needs, increase IT team retention and longevity, improve firm-wide business performance, and much more.