Many industries are transitioning to a digitalized world these days due to new opportunities and applications that come with it. This process has been accelerated in various ways due to the Covid-19 pandemic, to the point where many organizations have been able to digitalize some aspects of their daily tasks in a short period of time, ranging from using new technology and equipment like AI to utilizing social media and web-based platforms for forming virtual communities. We, as master's students with an engineering background, became interested in this topic and began reviewing literature to learn more about it. We noticed that the impact of digitalization on leadership in the healthcare industry has not been adequately addressed in previous academic work. We approached this topic as social constructionists with a relativistic perspective, and attempted to conduct a qualitative study with in-depth interviews with knowledgeable managers and employees in three different countries with different organizational cultures. This allowed us to examine how this process would affect both hierarchical and flat organizational management systems. Next, we went through open coding, trend identification, and templating. Following the theoretical framework and comparing the findings from different sample groups led to an interesting conclusion: Digitalization, as expected and as a support to our theoretical framework, helps organizations be more productive and deliver higher service quality, training and academic in this way helps all members, especially managers, do their jobs better, and there was no difference between the three different group samples. The final and most intriguing finding is that in the presence of digitalization, flat organizations become flatter thanks to the various tools that digitalization provides to the system to create a closer and more flat communication structure, whereas in hierarchical organizations, managers use the tools provided by this phenomenon to cement their position and power pyramid. To put it another way, digitalization alone will not be able to shape or even force the organizational structure to become flatter; all those virtual teams and web-based platforms will be used in the way that the current organization structure desires.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hj-57978 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Teymoori, Reza, Van Leeuwen, Reza |
| Publisher | Jönköping University, Internationella Handelshögskolan |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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