Relationships have been documented to be the hub of employee social activities in the workplace. With the disruptions of Industry 4.0, much value and attention is given to machines and technology. Concepts of leadership and followership held by organizations may no longer hold water to determine the place of man and machines as relational tools in the workplace and to highlight the promotion of values in the man-human interface in the 4IR. The centrality of this chapter will be to determine whether the leadership and followership theories are relevant to organizations in the face of 4IR. In the 4IR, practitioner's attention should be on human development to lead despite technological advancements and the development of artificial intelligence.
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The capacity development and the continued smartness of the machines has manifested a new form of partnership between humans and machines. The partnership is the augmentation of human expertise and the artificial intelligence to find and develop talent. Platforms are developed that align with the thinking of human to meet their needs social (Shuen, 2018). Alexa talks to you, Google finds answers to your quests, Amazon knows your preferences, Facebook knows your friends and can help you find one if need be. The world has accepted the digital smartness of Artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, natural language processing, automation, and robots. The digital smartness is projected to affect the workplace and the global economy. It will add $15.7 trillion to global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2030. Increase productivity, wages, and require new skills by 65%. 10% of job [positions are unknown today. If this partnership can have economic and professional impact, what does the future hold for workplaces? Six distinct areas have been of interest to the global economic players, these are productivity and growth, natural resources, labour markets, global financial markets, economic impact of technology and innovation, and urbanization. The interest of this chapter is the automation of employment (Lent, 2018).
Automation is not a new phenomenon, and fears about its transformation of the workplace and effects on employment date back centuries, even before the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. The US president in the 1960s Lyndon Johnson was of the view that” technology destroys jobs, but not work”. * Fast forward and rapid recent advances in automation technologies, including artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and robotics are now raising the fears anew—and with new urgency (Cook, 2019). In 2017, a report on automation, employment, and productivity documented the potentials of the global economy, the timeliness over which phenomenon could play out and the capacity of automation to boost production if adopted. The report of a research program by McKinsey Global Institute is imperative as a guide to the future of work (Manyika 2017).