The contribution of organizational culture, structure, and leadership factors in the digital transformation of SMEs: a mixed-methods approach

Abstract

Contributing to the scarce literature on how companies can deal with their business model of digital transition, this work explores the digital transformation (DT) process in small and medium enterprises (SME), investigating how organizational culture, structure, and leadership influence it. While such three factors are deemed essential components to facilitate DT, how they operate and how they relate to each other are still not very well-defined issues in need of in-depth investigation. This study employed a mixed-methods approach, following an exploratory sequential design. First, a conceptual model was developed based on qualitative data collected from expert interviews and analyzed through grounded theory. This stage uncovered 25 first-order concepts about culture, structure, and leadership, further organized into 6 constructs and hypothesis paths. Then, with a sample of 192 SMEs, the structural model was measured and validated using exploratory factor analysis and PLS-SEM. As a result, our study offers robust and timely research, whose conceptual model condenses a knowledge corpus that future research can benefit from, and it provides statistical extrapolations about how and how much those factors relate to each other in SME context; moreover, given the traditional scarce resources and lack of flexibility in SMEs, it provides orientation and guidelines to managers facing DT and needing to understand the organizational factors they should be aware of, where to focus energy, and what to expect as results. From a large-scale perspective, this study carries an impactful contribution to the many countries where SMEs play a major economic and social role.

A New Era of Culture Shaping Has Emerged: Here’s How It May Affect Organizations

“…The pandemic is over, and people are flocking back to work in droves. Changing the approach towards in-house versus remote work is an organizational culture essential (Leso et al, 2022). The result of this change in the business environment and the new requirements of the external business environment adhere to a new corporate culture (Kopnina, 2017), one that could be both remote, when necessary, and hosted at the office when mandated (Flood, 2019).…”

“…Employees, as informal cultivators of the culture, share their attitudes and views in their continuous support of a dynamic culture (McGhee et al, 2022;Pilehvar, 2022). The human resource management department is responsible for monitoring this process so that there is maximum coordination between the views of employees and the definition of culture by senior managers (Kregel et al, 2022;Leso et al, 2022;Ribeiro & Gomes, 2016). This human resource process offers training and development and cultural activities (i.e., music, entertainment, camaraderie, and fellowship) throughout the year.…”

Identifying the factors influencing enterprise digital transformation intention: an empirical study based on net effects and joint effects

“…Organizational culture plays a central role in addressing digital transformation issues (Warner and W€ ager, 2019;Matricano et al, 2022;Leso et al, 2022). The innovation-decisionprocess model (Rogers, 1995(Rogers, , 2003 considers a firm's communication behavior as a key internal characteristic that influences its decision-making (innovation decision) process.…”

“…Some scholars believe that the level of use of digital technology and organizational policies also have a nonnegligible role in digital transformation (Chen, 2022; Wang and Su, 2021). Clearly, in addition to factors such as organizational culture, the digital skills of employees and the role of digital leadership models have also been proven to be important (Jackson and Dunn-Jensen, 2021; Matricano et al ., 2022; Leso et al ., 2022).…”

Promises of industry 4.0 under the magnifying glass of interdisciplinarity: revealing operators and managers work and challenging collaborative robot design

“…We opted to focus on a Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) field as: (1) they are a prime target of the French "Industry of the Future" programme and they represent 99% of business in Europe, 8 (2) they have specific needs regarding to digital transformation (Leso et al 2023 ), (3) and their "restricted" size makes them kind of " in vivo laboratories" which seems to us to be favourable to the development of interdisciplinary approaches.…”