Leadership as a social influence process has always involved a complex set of phenomena that demands an interdisciplinary lens. Leadership scholarship has now entered into a digital era. In a digital era, the overall phenomenon is changing, as are the tools through which we study it, demanding a new “lens” through which we view leadership. Yet, this raises the question, to what extent is leadership different in a digital era? In acknowledgement of this trend, a special issue was commissioned at The Leadership Quarterly that sought to stimulate the imagination of leadership scholars and practitioners. In the current work, we begin with a brief review of who, what, when, where and why of digital leadership. We cover leadership in informal contexts (e.g., social media), generalization from face-to-face to virtual contexts, computational modeling, the leveraging of technology (e.g., machine learning; Big Data), as well methodological how-to guides. We then plot a path forward for leadership scholars in the dawn of the digital era.

领导力作为一个社会影响过程，总是涉及一系列复杂的现象，需要跨学科的视角。领导力奖学金现已进入数字时代。在数字时代，整体现象正在发生变化，我们研究它的工具也在发生变化，需要一个新的“镜头”来看待领导力。然而，这提出了一个问题，在数字时代，领导力在多大程度上有所不同？鉴于这一趋势，《领导力季刊》特刊特刊，旨在激发领导力学者和从业者的想象力。在当前的工作中，我们首先简要回顾了数字领导力的人物、内容、时间、地点和原因。我们涵盖了非正式环境（例如社交媒体）中的领导力、从面对面到虚拟环境的概括、计算建模、技术的利用（例如，机器学习；大数据），以及方法指南。然后，我们在数字时代的曙光中为领导学者规划了一条前进的道路。