How leadership style and behaviour influence decision making and enhance big data decision-making capability

Abstract

Big data is the proliferation of data from various sources because everything is connected, and this contributes to a rich data trail of customer behaviours and needs, machinery or processes. Leaders are increasingly exploring how to create and extract value from big data by enhancing their organisation’s decision-making capability. Big data is considered to be a valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and non-substitutable (VRIN) resource for the organisation and a source of competitive advantage, as described in the resource-based view of the firm. Big data being a VRIN resource is not sufficient in itself to result in higher quality decisions that consequently provide a competitive advantage. Leaders play a vital role in the orchestration of several resources to enable their dynamic capabilities and enhance the organisation’s big data decision-making capability. This research posits that leadership style influences big data decision-making capability and that there is not a single optimal style; leaders rather have to dynamically shift between optimal blends of leadership styles as determined by the context and the specific follower. These optimal blends of leadership styles are made up by a combination of transformational, transactional, and pragmatic leadership styles supplemented with leadership self-identities and contextual leadership. A conceptual model to guide the leaders in which blend of styles to focus on to enhance their big data decision-making capability has been developed during this research. Leaders need to paint an unconstrained picture of a future in which big data driven decisions are used and unite the team to become data-driven. In order to sustain the benefit from big data after the vision has been set, the leader needs to support by utilising execution, relational, and intellectual stimulation skills. This will be supported by aligning leadership style and behaviour to the context and incorporating the community. Consequently, leaders should not aspire to a single leadership style, like transformational leadership, or discourage transactional leadership, but rather acknowledge that a blend of leadership styles is required to enhance big data decision-making capability. Leaders should not be stuck in the world of business intelligence, and machine data, and miss all the benefits that big data could add to their business. Leaders need to start dreaming big where data-driven decisions are concerned and have the courage to take the first step or increase their pace of big data adoption.