How to Drive Digital Transformation? – A Configurational Analysis on the Impact of CDOs

Abstract

Business digitization defined as the use of new digital technologies with the aim of enabling major business improvements is one of the main drivers of firms’ competitive capability and performance. The Chief Digital Officer (CDO) as functional top manager in charge of digital transformation has accordingly attracted the interest of management research and practice alike. However, research up to date fails to provide insights on when and why CDOs are successful in fostering business digitization. In this paper, we draw on configuration theory and previous research on top managers’ contribution to organizational innovation in order to develop a middle-range theory explaining CDOs’ impact on business digitization. Thereby, we link CDOs’ skills, networks, behaviors and positional context in a comprehensive research framework and conduct a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) on survey data from 96 CDOs. The results reveal four equifinal configurations that lead to high levels of business digitization. These configurations display three distinct patterns of interplay between CDOs’ skills, networks and behaviors and demonstrate that the positive effect of the particular pattern on business digitization is contingent upon contextual factors, namely the pressure for digitization and the CDO’s influence in the particular organization.