Digital and Transformational Maturity: Key Factors for Effective Leadership in the Industry 4.0 Era

Pawel Poszytek

In an era of rapid technological advancement, precipitating significant global changes and novel socio-economic patterns, a re-evaluation of contemporary leadership paradigms is necessitated to guide societies successfully through these socio-economic transformations. Given that leadership is an inherently general and abstract phenomenon, this paper proposes a practical examination through the lens of the transformational maturity of individual leaders, alongside the digital and transformational maturity of organizations aspiring to spearhead market changes. In the latter context, both digital and transformational maturity are subsumed under the broader concept of organizational maturity, which serves as a tangible metric of leadership at the organizational level. Accordingly, this paper will present and analyze selected contemporary approaches to leadership, the global context of change relative to pervasive digital transformation, and empirical research findings pertaining to European leaders and companies. The overarching framework for this analysis is Industry 4.0, characterized by process automation and integration within enterprises, and the emerging Industry 5.0, which incorporates a human-centric dimension into this concept [1].

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