Transformational Leadership in Digital Era: Analysis of Nadiem Makarim (Founder of GO-JEK Indonesia) Leadership Figure

Technology and internet have driven innovation and new opportunities by digitizing customers, companies, products, services, and processes. In the digital era, the company has potential to touch all aspects of the business, including customers, employees, partners, business processes, and also a global network of businesses and things from every industry around the world. These conditions bring fundamental changes to community behaviours and its potential consequences. When the organizations adapt themselves to the changes, they require transformational leadership. The objective of this paper is to describe the concept of transformational leadership as a hallmark of a future digital business leader. From the evidence in the literature, in many successful organizations, transformational leaders have contributed to increasing the effectiveness and performance of the organizations. By using the descriptive method with a phenomenological approach, the practice of transformational leadership of Nadiem Makarim as the founder of GO-JEK Indonesia (an Indonesian-owned and run technology start-up that specialises in ride-hailing, logistics, and digital payments) is examined. Then, this paper as a preliminary study provides a review of how Makarim‟s leadership philosophy and practice has brought GO-JEK into success, Indonesia‟s biggest start-up.


Introduction
Digital revolution has made information abundant, quickly available, and less costly. Digital revolution deals with mobility, which is characterized by interactivity between individuals or social groups, spontaneous communicative reaction, declining physical spaces because everything is tied in internet space, possibility to use digital networks communication at any time, unlimited possibility to access all contents available online, and cost reduction because big investment is not required (Peciulis, 2016). In the digital era, organizations find competitive advantage in learning, creativity, innovation, and leadership. The old ways of leading people by commanding and controlling will not work in this era (Jakubik & Berazhny, 2017).
A leader can influence the organization and community overall (Jandaghi et al., 2009). Organizations have to perform some changes in areas such as strategies, human resources, structures, etc. to adapt themselves to the environment. Sometimes, organizations need to make radical and fundamental changes. In this matter, transformational leadership is needed to make such changes to handle internal problems and to achieve higher performance. A transformational leader is a person who encourages and inspires followers to get extraordinary outcomes. The leader pays attention to the interests and developmental needs of individual followers and changes followers" consciousness about problems by helping them to consider the old problem in a new way (Odumeru & Ifeanyi, 2013).
Transformational leadership meets the needs of people who want to be inspired and empowered to succeed in many situations. When people are facing difficulties, economic and social pressure, or when organizations are challenged with workers dissatisfaction and unfulfilled expectation, they need a transformational leader (Wiltshire, 2012). Moreover, in the context of current leadership practices in the digital era, people still requires a human touch of leadership. They need to share ideas and receive care. They also expect the leader who has the following skills; social intelligence, open-mindedness, communication, empowering others, anticipating the future and establishing vision (Jakubik & Berazhny, 2017). The leadership philosophy which is suitable to be applied in this context is more likely to be transformational.
Many previous research findings show that transformational leadership affects organizational performance and business success in various sectors and contexts, including manufacturing, service, social work, strategic project, entrepreneurial firms and Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-based applications organization. In Indonesia, a business start-up, GO-JEK, was the pioneer in application-based motorcycle ride-hailing. Competing against global and regional competitors, this local application GO-JEK has found a way to be a successful company. In that sense, the success of the organization means that the key person in the organization develops characteristics and behaviours of transformational leadership. This descriptive study provides a factual about the analysis of nature and essential qualities of transformational leadership, in this case, represented by the key person of GO-JEK Indonesia, Nadiem Makarim.

Literature Reviews
Leadership can be defined as the ability to generate confidence and support among people to achieve organizational goals. The current understanding of leadership is a long-term relationship between leader and the people being led. This means leadership is not something leader do to people, but something that leader do with them (DuBrin, 2010). Maxwell (2018) described leadership as influence. Thus, leadership must be earned and cannot be mandated. This means, leadership is not the ability to achieve position, rank, or title, but leadership is the ability to get the followers. Everyone has potential as a leader because everyone can influence other people. Everyone can increase his/her influence and leadership potential by starting to communicate effectively. Communication leads to recognition and recognition lead to influence.
Several theories tried to explain leadership effectiveness. Two of the most distinguished leadership theories are transactional and transformational theories. The concept of transformational leadership as the opposite of transactional leadership was introduced by James Macgregor Burns in 1978 in his research about political leaders. Following Burns" study, its usage has spread into psychology and management with further modifications by Bass and Avalio (Odumeru and Ifeanyi, 2013). Burns concluded that transactional and transformational leadership are conceptually and practically different. Burns described transactional leadership on the basis of a profitable exchange relationship between the leader and the followers. A transactional leader influences their followers through incentives or punishments in accordance with their performance, whereas transformational leader influence followers" values, beliefs and goals (Jandaghi et al., 2009). Burns compared between transactional and transformational leadership as shown in Table 1. Based on the evidence in the literature, Odumeru and Ifeanyi (2013) provided a comparative analysis of transactional and transformational leadership. A transactional leader does not anticipate future changes; the leader only keeps things the same. The transactional leader accepts the goals, structure and culture of the organization, work within the existing system of organization and tends to think inside the box when solving problems. Transactional leader notices the followers" work in order to find mistakes and aberrations. The transactional leader gives rewards for positive results and punishes poor results because the leader tends to be directive and action-oriented. In the context of Maslow"s hierarchy of needs, a transactional leader focuses on the basic levels of needs satisfaction. Transactional leadership is effective in crisis and emergency situation. However, in many different contexts, including business and even military circumstances, studies have shown that transformational leadership was more effective to improve performances, such as higher productivity level, lower turnover rates, goals achievement, creativity, employee satisfaction and followers" welfare.
Referring to Jandaghi et al. (2009), the characteristics of a transformational leader can be summarized as follows:  Leader and followers encourage each other to achieve higher levels of morality and motivation.  A leader inspires the followers to consider more than their own objectives and interests and to concentrate on the greater team, organizational, and global objectives and do extraordinary works.  A leader can move the organizations toward the ideal perspective for improvement by coordinating the followers and integrating all system elements.  Leader enlarges followers" creativity and spirituality.  The leader has a vision and can draw a better picture for future, then defines the vision effectively for followers and followers will admit the vision as a fact interestingly.
There are four components of transformational leadership (Odumeru &Ifeanyi, 2013 andJandaghi, et al., 2009):  Charisma Charisma causes the leader to be a behavioral model for followers. Transformational leader enlarges the morale and performance of the followers by being a role model for them. It is a factor in receiving changes in the organization. A leader can lead others only when they are ready to be led by him/her. Charisma shows the capability of trust building and understanding leadership by followers. A leader with charisma is respected and trusted a person because such person performs his/her duties well and has high human and moral behaviors.  Inspirational motivation Inspirational motivation is the capability of the leader to encourage the followers to appropriate behaviors inspirationally. The leader can encourage the followers to accept new idea and belief continuously because the leader behaves in a particular way and excites his/her followers. The leader can inspire followers and challenge followers to take ownership of their works.

 Intellectual stimulation
Intellectual stimulation is the capability of the leader to encourage the followers to be creative and innovative. Therefore, they may use new and creative ideas the resolve the problems. In the service sector, Naeem and Khanzada (2018) have explored the relationship between transformational leadership as the independent variable and employee performance as the dependent variable and have investigated job satisfaction as a mediator in the health sector in Pakistan. It was found that transformational leadership positively influence employee performance in the health sector in Pakistan and job satisfaction effect as a mediator has a partial effect. In the context of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) adoption to provide the organization with new opportunities to improve competitive advantage, research by Waziri et al. (2015) shows that transformational leadership behaviors directly and positively affect ICT adoption in construction organizations in Nigerian. The result implies that during a technological change in organizations, the leaders need to demonstrate transformational leadership traitsmentioned research models above highlight that transformational leadership has a positive influence on the company"s success, project success, entrepreneurial success, business performance, employee performance, and competitive advantage.

Research Methods
This descriptive study is conducted to explain various aspects and the practice of transformational leadership (characteristics and behaviors) by examining the leadership style of a figure (Nadiem Makarim). The phenomenological approach that can be applied in a single/individual case is used in this research.
First, the author formulated topics and research questions about how Makarim"s leadership practices. Then, data and review of literature were collected from off-line and online media related to Makarim and GO-JEK from 2016 until 2018. This process involves the identification and evaluation of references from secondary data sources including interview notes, conversations and textual analysis on the topic of interests, making detail comments about individual situations and reporting the findings by including direct quotes and extensive quotes (Lester, 1999).
In the next phase, the author analyzed the data from the texts and in-depth interviews. Since the research seeks to identify and explore the phenomenon under study to get better understand to the problem, then the approach used in this research is the interpretative approach. The author tries to see the social world from Makarim"s perspective to explain his daily life experiences, behaviors and perspectives to find out the complexities of the situation. This interpretative approach depends on Makarim"s view and the author"s view of reality. Thus the author can discover the importance of action and make it clear for others what this particular behavior means. It needs to be interpreted in a way that other people can simply understand.

Discussions
This research is preliminary research that describes the characteristics of the phenomenon that is being studied (transformational leadership traits of Nadiem Makarim). This research has not explored the association between transformational leadership as the independent variable and business performance or other variables as the dependent variable.
At the first stage, the author formulated the following questions to investigate transformational leadership practices of Nadiem Makarim:

Characteristics and Behaviors of Transformational Leadership of Nadiem Makarim
It can be determined that leadership characteristics and behaviors demonstrated by Nadiem Makarim are similar to what is explained in the literature about transformational leadership:  Makarim demonstrates intellectual stimulation behavior which has an important role in organizational changes. Makarim develops new and creative ideas to solve problems and tries to encourage his followers to be creative and innovative. This quality can be found from how the idea about GO-JEK developed.
Jakarta as the capital of Indonesia is a hectic city. Many people in Jakarta live in traffic, and they choose to ride motorcycles to avoid the traffic jam because riding motorcycles is more effective than riding in cars. This situation has offered a business opportunity for some people to become a motorcycle taxi or "ojek" drivers. Traditionally, "ojek" as general public transport uses a base as a gathering place and the drivers wait for passengers at the base. Sometimes, the drivers randomly scatter in the city or wait on street corners to negotiate with a customer who needs a ride.

Figure 2. Traditional 'Ojek'
While in Jakarta, Makarim navigated a lot on "ojek" and became friends with "ojek" drivers. Makarim trusted them in taking him around everywhere in Jakarta to buy food and something like that (https://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com, 2016). According to Makarim, more than 70% of the working time of "ojek" drivers is spent waiting for passengers and stuck in a traffic jam in Jakarta. "Ojek" also uses the bidding process to determine the "ojek" price for customers without any standard price per kilometre (Natadjaja & Setyawan, 2016). Originally, the idea to launch GO-JEK came about from Makarim"s frustration with taking "ojek" to overcome the traffic in Jakarta but the pricing was un-transparent, and "ojek" cannot be found during rush hour. Makarim found a problem and then he decided to solve the problem in a new way as indicated by the following remarks (https://www.cnbc.com, 2018): "So the idea was what if we can take the fastest motor vehicle and have them not only perform human mobility operations but also potentially move stuff around in the fastest way possible." "I think a lot of people did not believe back then that ojek could be professional and could be trusted." "I sent them on a variety of errands including delivering my own laptop somewhere else or buying some food. And so by getting to know them, I quickly realized that this informal sector is incredibly valuable." The critical thing that Makarim realized was if he builds trust with "ojek" drivers properly, the drivers were ready to work beyond the normal working hours. So their willingness to work a number of hours at better remunerations gave birth to the idea of GO-JEK (https://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com, 2016).
Makarim"s crucial decision to concentrate on "ojek" (motorcycles taxi) avoided direct competition with existing car taxi industry in Jakarta. "I hope that GO-JEK will be talked about 10 years from now, 20 years from now as the company that proved technology is actually the key enabler in unleashing an economy, in making it leapfrog into the next stage of societal evolution, that technology creates so much efficiency that the scalability of any type of positive impact that you are trying to create can be achieved because we are in this mobile tech revolution. So that is my hope, my hope is that this is going to be the blueprint for development across the world." Makarim"s optimistic speaking about the future, the attractive perspective of the future and confidence that the goal will be reached reflect the quality of inspirational motivation.
 Makarim focuses on followers" higher ideals and moral values to achieve goals. His statement as can be seen in the following remarks (https://www.cnbc.com, 2018) indicates that Makarim helps his followers in achieving their potential talents in the organization. "The point of inflexion in the leaders that I mentor and coach is the moment by which they realize that they could achieve something that they thought they couldn't, and to do that sometimes you have to stretch their imagination first and stretch their effort and then at the end of that cycle they realize "Oh my god, look at what I achieved, I never thought I could achieve that" and that gives them the confidence to then go on and build on their own."  Makarim pays attention to followers. Paying attention to individuals is one of the most important aspects of transformational leadership because followers like to have a leader who cares about them and their work. Makarim encourages drivers to feel like an integral part of the organization. Drivers who do not have enough money to pay for a smartphone were given loans to buy one. GO-JEK also provides assistance to drivers who do not have the required documents to register as the drivers officially. Drivers can proudly expose their association with GO-JEK via branded apparels and accessories (Davis, 2018    Makarim moves the organization toward the ideal perspective for improvement by coordinating the followers and integrating all system elements. Makarim puts confidence in a group of people that were for the most part ignored by society and by companies. This creates such a powerful sense of pride and belonging. Makarim acknowledges that the drivers are customers as well. He does not directly employ them, but he tries to give them as many benefits as possible. He gives them full accident insurance when they are on the job; he provides the cheapest national rate for private health insurance that they can subscribe to and he gives them a variety of safe driving training (https://www.cnbc.com, 2018).

Conclusion and Suggestion
We live in a digital era. People and organizations need leaders who understand the impact of digital technology on business and community, be able to adapt to change and get people working together to solve the current issues. To remain competitive in the digital era, digital leaders must be transformational leaders who encourage and inspire people to get extraordinary outcomes. Many previous research findings show that transformational leadership affects organizational performance and business success in various sectors in many situations. This study has explored the qualities of transformational leadership of Nadiem Makarim, founder of GO-JEK, Indonesia"s biggest start-up in the digital era by using the phenomenological approach. From the analysis of Makarim"s leadership style, it is clear that Makarim demonstrates the characteristics and behaviors of transformational leadership. An understanding of transformational leadership characteristics and behaviors is crucial for leaders to achieve higher performance and to become inspirational. Transformational leaders are key persons of social changes and transforming organizations and the environment. Therefore, it is suggested that leaders in the digital era should be aware of transformational leadership and apply its traits in practices. Further research is recommended to get a better understanding about the relationship between transformational leadership and business success in the digital era, especially to investigate the association among transformational leadership, job satisfaction, business performance, etc., at GO-JEK Indonesia.