“Impact of technology on different leadership styles to support distanced working: A study of India's service sector with reference to Delhi / NCR area”

Indian service sector has witnessed the growth of technology at unprecedented pace that has impacted the creation and development of remote working environment. This changing organizational environment and market demands require an alignment between technology and leadership. In this context the current study aims to find the impact of technology on different leadership styles to support distanced working, particularly, after the spread of the global pandemic. For this, 328 respondents working in service sector of Delhi &NCR were surveyedthrough structured questionnaire. Findings of the study revealed that technology has an influence on different leadership styles in supporting distanced working by providing clear communication, skill management, participation, or guiding work behavior. Additionally, technology plays significant role of enabling distanced working through contribution of technology in supporting communication and mobility, determination of technology task-fit, or creating of sense of unity. Thus, using the practices like cloud based internal communication portal or the reward and recognition facility, the benefit of technology could be derivedandbusiness continuity.


1.
Introduction Technology and its ever evolving and user centric enabling mechanisms and approaches are responsible for shifting the planning and execution of leadership in the modern world. With the development of technology, the workforce needs and aspirations have changed. There has been stimulation of growth in several industries including the service sector (Sexena, 2015).Technological advancement in the service sector has contributed tothe adoption of distanced working style, i.e. working through electronic processing, expanded telework opportunities, and increase collaboration through virtual teams without physical presence at a specific location/office. The culmination of these factors necessitates the need for new strategies and skills that help leaders meet market demands (Connally and Morris, 2017). Without the alignment between technology and leadership, it would be difficult for the organizations to meet the constantly shifting current market demands. Also without properly developed leadership competencies, organizations may face a risk of shrinking market share or market decline (Deboiset al., 2016). Technological advancement has laid the groundwork for Fourth Industrial Revolution specifically in the service sector in India (ILO, 2018). Currently, Indian service sector is wellpositioned in terms of prevalence of remote working environments with presence of qualified manpower, a low-cost advantage, and previous service delivery track records in sectors like IT (Ganeshan and Vethirajan, 2020). The estimated revenue directed by the remote working by end of 2020 was $133-315 billion (Dwivedi and Gopalakrishnan, 2020). Malhotra, (2020) reported in a study that, in India, 1 in 2 employees prefers telecommuting. Despite the importance of remote working environment in India, there have been only a few researches to explore the impact of technology on different leadership styles to support distanced working. As, with the growing ISSN: 00333077 5693 www.psychologyandeducation.net technological advancement and the promotion of remote working environment, Indian service sector have the opportunity of improving their service delivery along with supporting productive working from qualified workforce. Thus, this study would focus on exploring the impact of technology with respect to service industries in India.

2.
Aim of study The current study aims to assess the impact of technology on different leadership styles to support remote working in India's service sector with reference to Delhi & NCR.
Types of leadership in India's service sector Among the different types of leadership in the Indian service sector, Kumar, (2014)shed light on the presence of three different styles. These include authoritarian, participative, and laissezfaire styles of leadership. In authoritarian leadership style, leaders pay less focus on the creation of inclusiveness in the team. Inputs from the group are rarely taken and the leader has control over all decisions. As they do not permit discussions, decision-making is a faster process (Busse and Regenberg, 2018). On the other hand, participative approach to leadership is a people-oriented approach. These leaders encourage direct feedback from subordinates and use positive reinforcement for efficiently handling them. Decision-making involves each or majority of members of the team which leads to an inclusive approach to team handling (Naik, 2015). Third, the laissez-faire approach of leadership is passive. The leader following this approach is reluctant to influence subordinates and provides them freedom and autonomy in work. Leadership under laissez faire is based on noninterference (Rassa and Emeagwali, 2020). In addition, Ekkirala, Madhubala and Goute, (2013) also identified the prevalence of transactional and transformational leadership. Under transactional leadership, focus on the role of organization, supervision, and group performance is emphasized. These leaders use punishment and reward to attain compliance from followers. These leaders accept the existing organizational goals and structure and negotiate with the team for the attainment of these goals. Transactional leaders are primarily passive and strive to maintain the status quo (Kabeyi, 2018). Also, Budhiraja and Malhotra, (2013) shed light on transformational leadership practices in the Indian service sector. The author highlighted that following the transformational style, leaders focus on motivating subordinates through enthusiasm and visionary capabilities. The leadership style was further found to invoke positive behavior among employees including organizational commitment and job satisfaction in the service sector. These translate into proper orientation of subordinates towards the accomplishment of organizations' long-term goals (Tonkin, 2013).

Role of technology in different leadership styles
The role of technology in organizations varies according to the prevailing leadership styles. Klempin and Karp, (2018)found that under an authoritative leadership style, technology changes and implementation do not impact the underlying processes or structures in the organization. This is because the authoritative approach focuses on the maintenance of clear commands and hierarchy, which prevents adaptive role for the subordinates. On the other hand, the role of technology in the participative leadership approach is to manage skilled teams more efficiently. The leader uses technology to induce greater participation and engagement among teammembers. The participative leadership style allows the usage of technology in modern organizations to attain a more fluid approach and align employees towards the accomplishment of organizational goals (Sinani, 2016). Also, Gemeda and Lee, (2020) in a study highlighted that role of technology is not significant in supporting distanced working under the laissez-faire leadership style. The author found the leadership style is weakly positively correlated with innovative work behavior and work engagement. Even, leadership does not impact ISSN: 00333077 5694 www.psychologyandeducation.net work engagement or task performance among subordinates. In addition, Gençer and Samur, (2016) highlighted that role of technology is strongly correlated to the contingent reward factor of the transactional leadership approach. With the use of technology these leaders have formal control and power over subordinates and can make them focus on short-term goals. Farouk Soliman, (2016) found that transactional leadership has a significant effect on technology transfer effectiveness that allows the introduction of new techniques to subordinates and generation of new knowledge. Finally, the role of technology in transformational leadership has been established in a study by Tomi Mano, Thoyib and Maskie(2014).
The author found that transformational leadership style is related to leader's innovation and responsibility in decisionmaking. It supports the integration of information and communication technology in organizations through the development of shared vision, individualized support, building consensus, and intellectual stimulation(Gençer and Samur, 2016).

3.3.
Importance of technology for enabling remote working, especially in leadership Considering the technological evolution and progress, it has been identified as a significant factor in enabling remote working trends. Technology paves the path for flexibility, virtual teams, inducing new ways of communication, and mobility for the creation of a remote working environment. However, the leader has to play an adaptive role to make proper use of technologies. This includes its usage for creation and utilization in a good technology-task-fit manner for the employee. At the same time, the leaders have to make use of social and cultural intelligence through virtual management tools to handle the geographically dispersed teams (Sivunen, Nurmi and Koroma, 2016; Großer and Baumöl, 2017). Also, technology is important for leaders as it allows them to maintain transparent, frequent, and consistent communication. In a distributed workforce, it helps to maintain two-way dialogue between leaders and their team hence easing up the remote working and navigation (Alward and Phelps, 2019). Further, technology enable leaders to facilitate team members in gaining more autonomy and allows their real-time involvement (Schwarzmüller et al., 2018). Also, technology is important to ensure that leaders create a positive organizational environment. This is achieved by fostering a strong sense of unity and collaboration among employees by the usage of new-age information and communication technologies i.e. enhancing communication, mobility, determination of technology-task-fit, autonomy, real-time involvement among the staff, positive organizational environment with a sense of unity and collaboration in making faster decisions with real-time data to guide productivity and engagement and provide the team with clear performance expectations. Further, focusing on the Technological impact on different leadership styles, Figure-1 shows that technology helps in clear communication and skill management, improved participation and task performance, accomplishment of organizational goals, create congruence in work behaviour and engagement, technology transfer for generation of new knowledge, development of shared vision, individualized support on need basis, building consensus and intellectual stimulation. As there are five major leadership styles, i.e., authoritative, participative, laissez-faire, transactional, and transformational, thus, the framework helps in building in the linkage between technology and different leadership styles in order to highlights the existing relationship between them.

4.
Research Methodology After identifying the critical elements of this research, the researcher conducted an empirical study consisting of the survey method to assess service sector employees' perception about how technology is affecting different leadership styles in their remote working environments. • Organizations with significant presence in the service sector, i.e. nation-wide scale and mid-sized firms. • Organizations with IT/ ITES solutions as the primary service offering. • Organizations not established later than 2010 and consisting of at least 200 employees. Initially, 8 firms were approached out of which 5 agreed to participate in the study. An initial email was sent to the administration of each firm explaining the intent of this study and requesting their participation and assuring them that the responses of individual participating employees would be kept with utmost confidentiality. Based on their response, a sample of 100 employees from each firm were drawn based on the strata of working they belonged to, and they were contacted by their respective human resource department for participation in the survey. Therefore, purposive sampling method was applied to identify and select the respondents for the survey. Purposive sampling allowed the researcher to set the qualifying criteria as stated above. The sample size was determined using Cochran's formula i.e.
wherein, n: sample size z: confidence level z score value (1.96) p: proportion of the population participating in the study e: desired level of precision or margin of error A structured, close-ended questionnaire was framed.
A Google Form was created and the link was shared with the representatives of the firms. The questionnaire consisted of questions pertaining to demographic, general background, and inferential section questions. This questionnaire was shared virtually with all identified employees (n=500) across organizations and over the next two weeks, they were reminded to fill in their responses. At the end of the two weeks' period, only 328 employees responded by filling the questionnaires. Therefore, the final sample size of the study was 328 only. Their responses were extracted, coded and processed for hypothesis testing using SPSS software. For fulfillment of the aim, the below stated hypothesis was tested. H01: Technology does not have an influence on different leadership styles in supporting distanced working. H02: Technology does not play a significant role in enabling distanced working The demographic and background sections were analyzed using frequency analysis while hypotheses were tested using SPSS software. The data collected from the respondents is stored in password protected device to maintain privacy and even the entire analysis procedure focused on minimization of the biasness, thus, the results derived from this study are valid, reliable, and ethical.

5.
Data analysis For examining the impact of technology on different leadership styles, initially demographic profile of the respondents is examined. Herein the survey of 328 respondents shows that most of them belong to the age group of 30 -40 years that is 40.9%, followed by those between 20 -30 years (32%

Figure 3: Background Analysis
Having the identification of the demographical characteristics and knowledge level of respondents, the linkage between technology and different leadership styles supporting distanced workingneed to be built. However, before this, the coding for the considered statements is done to    Table 3: Regression analysis for technology impact on leadership style supporting distance working The regression analysis reveals theR 2 value of 0.560and adjusted R 2 value of 0.555. This reveals that about 55.5%ofvariation in leadership styles is supporting distance working represented by technology. F-ratio is greater than 1 (102.948 > 1), hence precision of the model is derived by inclusion of respective independent statements. Pvalue for variables S1, S2, S4, and S5 are less than 0.05, thus, the null hypothesis of technology having no influence on different leadership styles in supporting distanced working is rejected. Coefficient values for the variables depict that with 1% increase in usage of technology leads to rise in clear communication and skill management (S1), participation and task performance (S2), accomplishment of organizational goals (S4), and work behavior and engagement (S5) by0.196%, 0.235%, 0.304%, and 0.140% respectively. Thus, more usage of technology tends to positively influence the role of different leadership style in supporting distanced working.

Role of technology in enabling distanced
working Based on statements described in Table 2, the linkage between the technology and the distanced working environment is studied using correlation analysis. Herein, results of the is presented in below Sig. (2-tailed) 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 Table 4: Correlation analysis for role of technology and distanced working Based on the significance value of 0.00 which is less than 0.05 and Karl Pearson's correlation values for variables D1 (0.537), D2 (0.551), D3 (0.508),D4 (0.523), D6 (0.510), and D7 (0.601) > 0.5, there is possibility of having relationship between the technology and distanced working environment. The impact assessment for these variables could be done by having the statistical test of below stated hypothesis at 5% level of significance. H02: Technology does not play a significant role in enabling distanced working HA2: Technology does play a significant role in enabling distanced working Thus, for relationship building, regression analysis is performed, results for which is shown in below  Table 5: Regression analysis for role of technology on distanced working Table 5 depicts the value of R 2 is 0.522 and adjusted R 2 value of 0.513 This shows that about 51.3% variation in distance working is caused by technology. F-ratio value is 58.438, which is greater than 1 showing more precision derivation by including respective independent statements. P-value of D1 (0.000), D2 (0.002), D4 (0.001), and D7 (0.000) < 0.05, thus, the null hypothesis of having no significant role of technology in enabling distanced working is rejected. Coefficient value represents that with 1% increase in the role of technology, there is better communication and mobility (D1), determination of technology task-fit (D2), sense of unity and collaboration (D4), and clear performance expectation (D7) increases by 0.262%, 0.155%, 0.152%, and 0.226% respectively. Thus, usage of technology tends to support distanced working.

6.
Conclusion The Indian service sector faces a critical challenge today: to improve its service delivery process with minimal cost to the company. This, in addition to the sudden large-scale shift to remote working environment in view of the new normal has prompted companies to bring the spotlight on efficient management of their primary resource, i.e., manpower. The prevalence of remote working environments in the service sector in India is augmented by the presence of qualified manpower, a low-cost advantage, and previous track records. In their quest for perfecting the leadership style best suited for their environment, companies are turning to technology. Technology is playing a critical role in every function of a business today. It has assisted companies in improving leadership in order to make them better suited for remote working environments. To complement distance working, five major forms of leadership are present in the Indian service sector i.e. authoritative, participative, laissez-faire, transactional, and transformational. It was found in this study that technology enables remote working trends by paving path for flexibility, communication, virtual teams, and mobility along with allowing the usage of social and cultural intelligence through virtual management tools.Thus, this study focused on determining the impact of technology on different leadership styles in the remote working environment by surveying 328 respondents. Maximum of them were from age group 20 -40 years and employed full time in distance working. Transformational style is most prevalent in service sector organizations in India.The analysis revealed that technology has an influence on different leadership styles in supporting distanced working by providing clear communication, skill management, participation, task performance, accomplishment of goals, guiding work behavior, and engagement. Also, through contribution of technology in supporting communication and mobility, determination of technology task-fit, sense of unity and collaboration, and clear performance expectation; there is significant role of technology in enabling distanced working. Based on these findings, the below stated strategies are recommended to be implemented by organizations.
• Communication mediums like internal portals or blogs should be developed for facilitating flexibility and clearance in communication. • Internal communication standards and documentation should be maintained for minimizing misinterpretation. • Employees should be motivated in form of rewards and recognition for the team such as monetary rewards and certificates of appreciation for promoting work behaviour, engagement, and intellectual stimulation in distanced working. Future studies centered on remote working environments and leadership can expand on the findings of this study by selecting a larger sample size from a diverse group of service sector firms across the country, identifying specific elements of leadership and technology that affect the company's productivity.