As digitalisation progresses, leadership must also make demands for the changing work environment. Developing effective leadership strategies has become an extensive area of research, but relatively few studies have focused on the underlying processes of leadership. In this study, I will place a lot of emphasis on how the leadership of the accounting industry develops in connection with automated working methods. By doing this, the survey contributes to further evolve current models around changes in leadership, by documenting future changes and contributing crucial information for applicable leadership assessment. In a semi-structured interview with 5 different case companies, this study has examined how digitalisation has changed leadership in the accounting industry based on three different aspects, leadership style, bureaucracy and decision-making methods.

Most evidence is that technological development has contributed to many digital aids that have transformed complex tasks such as decision-making and quality work, to become automated. It has given the leader the opportunity to put more focus on the core business as well as better measurement tools when it comes to results. In line with the development, a more results-oriented view has therefore been applied in leadership. Different characteristics have become more sought after by the employee in order to best suit the company's goals. The most prominent theme is time-efficient and solution-oriented. The most reasonable interpretation is that the characteristics contribute to the optimal way of working based on the leader's orientation, where the employees' performance is evaluated in quantitative results.Digitalisation has facilitated the cognitive process and added more confidence and room for maneuver to the employee when it comes to decision-making methods. The outcome indicates that the decision-making method in a digitalised work environment has become less and less hierarchical, and with the task orientation that has become more prominent, a dynamic workflow seems to be more prominent than a high nature of the working method.