Organizational Digital Literacy and Enterprise Digital Transformation: Evidence From Chinese Listed Companies

Abstract

The importance of organizational digital literacy has come to dominate discourse on enterprise digital transformation. Drawing on Organizational Affordance Theory, we explored the relationship between three levels of organizational digital literacy—employee, senior executive, and organization—and enterprise digital transformation. Utilizing a big data analytical tool, we first probed the employee digital literacy of Chinese listed companies, then analyzed this with senior executive digital literacy and organizational hard/soft digital literacy data to generate a configuration of organizational digital literacy conditions linked with higher level digital transformation. Our findings show that attributes of organizational digital literacy (i.e., employee, senior executive and hard/soft organizational) serve as important conditions for digital transformation, but higher level digital transformations are driven by a combination of these conditions through seven types of configurations. Extending the understanding of the role of organizational digital literacy during enterprise digital transformation, our study offers insight into strategic capability requirements for embarking on successful digital transformation.