Research on the Activation Path of Employees’ Openness to Digital Transformation: A New Impetus to Realize Enterprises’ Digital Transformation for Sustainable Development

Abstract

Digital transformation is an important strategic decision for the sustainable development of enterprises, which helps enterprises achieve sustainable performance, sustainable management, and even sustainable business models. While there have been a number of useful studies discussing the impetus of digital transformation, most of them have neglected the role from employees, especially their attitudes and perceptions towards transformation. Focusing on employees’ openness to digital transformation, we selected six antecedents to construct a configuration model, using fsQCA and NCA methods to explore the complex causal relationship between each antecedent and openness to digital transformation. This aims to derive the activation paths for employees’ openness to digital transformation, so as to help the enterprises’ digital transformation and further achieve sustainable development. Through the data analysis of 462 employees of Chinese enterprises, the following conclusions are drawn: firstly, single antecedents are not necessary conditions for high/non-high digital transformation openness activation; secondly, there are three configurations associated with the high openness activation of digital transformation: a comprehensive collaboration type under internal environment dominance (S1a + S1b), the consideration of both an internal and external environment type under mindfulness characteristics’ dominance (S2), and a mindful substitution type under internal environment dominance (S3); and finally, there are four configurations associated with non-high digital transformation openness activation and an asymmetric relationship exists with the high digital transformation openness activation path.