Measuring the Digital Mindset: Development and Validation of a Multidimensional Scale

Abstract

IS researchers and practitioners frequently claim that the 'digital mindset' is essential to achieving high employee performance and satisfaction and to leveraging opportunities in the context of pervasive digital innovation. However, extant literature has yet to provide a scale to measure the digital mindset in quantitative research. This study fills this gap by addressing the question of how the digital mindset can be measured. We conduct three studies to answer the research question and develop and validate a measurement model. In Study 1, we take literature-based and Delphi study-based approaches to create two types of scales, which we pre-validate through experts and purify through pilot tests. Study 2 undertakes confirmatory factor analyses (N = 147 and 142) to test the scales and three multidimensional conceptualizations of the digital mindset. Finally, Study 3 validates the criteria by testing the predictive ability of the model of IT mindfulness (N = 147 and 142) and by comparing the scales to the results of an interview-based approach measuring the digital mindset in a panel study (N = 42). Our results provide two newly developed and validated 39-item survey scales to assess the digital mindset that reflect an overall model of digital mindset based on agile, digital, and creative cognition, each of which contains several thinking patterns.