How industrial maintenance managers perceive socio-technical changes in leadership in the Industry 4.0 context

Innovations and advancements in technology create new opportunities to run and maintain manufacturing plants, which we refer to as digitalised manufacturing. This development is recognised as a socio-technical system (STS) change, where a change in the production system’s goals, technology, processes, people, or environment may lead to ripple effects between those sub-systems. Despite this, technology development and technology use cases account for most of the research within digitalised manufacturing, while little attention has been devoted to leadership practices considering digitalised manufacturing from a socio-technical perspective. This paper focuses on the maintenance organisation, whose mission in a company is to keep production systems functional. We aim to describe leadership in industrial maintenance from an STS perspective. This is a unique interview study where twenty maintenance managers from Swedish manufacturing industry offer their perspective on the changing leadership within maintenance, providing a unique insight into the challenges facing leaders of maintenance in digitalised manufacturing. We frame the empirical findings using an STS framework and propose an overall consideration model for leadership that supports the development of a functional maintenance organisation in the face of pervasive digitalisation.