Leading Agents or Stewards? Exploring Design Principles for Empowerment through Workplace Technologies

Workplace technologies lead to increasing levels of transparency for managers and employees. On the one hand, transparency facilitates novel styles of work, but on the other hand, it drives employee privacy concerns. Despite the technical possibilities to monitor employees, workforce demands empowerment leadership and challenges the assumptions from agency theory. Thus, following a design science research process and collaborating closely with the software provider SoftCo over three years, we aim to develop a suitable technical solution to the changing needs. We build on the knowledge base of stewardship theory, the concept of transparency, and existing market solutions. The design cycles are driven by literature search and empirical investigations, such as qualitative interviews at SoftCo. In this research-in-progress paper, we derive design requirements, design principles, and design features for digital leadership innovations that facilitate stewardship behavior and outline our further research agenda.