How does strategic consensus facilitate enterprises to break through the digital pilot dilemma?

战略共识如何助推企业突破数字化试点困境?

Abstract

With the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, a growing number of enterprises have embarked on digital strategic transformation, accelerating the integration of new-generation information technology with their business scenarios. However, in practice, many enterprises are still stuck at the pilot stage of digital transformation for certain businesses, facing challenges such as high transformation costs and low production efficiency, thus trapped in a pilot dilemma. How to effectively help enterprises break through this pilot dilemma and promote the transition from limited pilot projects to full-scale implementation of digital transformation has become an important practical issue. Existing research has focused on studying the influencing factors of enterprise digital transformation at the senior management level. It overlooked the proactive role of employees in the transformation process. As a process of organizational strategic change, the implementation and promotion of enterprise digital strategies cannot rely solely on the drive of senior management. It requires the participation and support of all the employees. Only when employees reach a common understanding and identification with the established strategies of the enterprise will they consciously and actively engage in the strategic practice process, thereby effectively enhancing the level of digital transformation. In this sense, this study introduces a context-driven perspective to explore the mechanism of strategic consensus influencing the scope of enterprise digital application from differentiated contextualized innovation behavior. By using 244 pairs of "leader-employee" questionnaire data to carry out empirical analysis, the results show that: (1) Strategic consensus has a significant positive impact on enterprises' expansion of the scope of digital application. When employees at all levels reach a consensus and high identification with the vision and goals of enterprise digital transformation, it helps promote the integrated application of digital technology across various business links, assisting enterprises in breaking through the digital pilot dilemma. (2) Strategic consensus promotes the expansion of the scope of enterprise digital application through contextualized innovative behavior. The common understanding of enterprise digital transformation among employees at all levels can encourage them to actively engage in user contextualized innovative behavior, product contextualized innovative behavior and operational contextualized innovative behavior, thereby driving the transition of the scope of enterprise digital application from limited pilots to full-scale implementation. Lastly, employees' digital literacy amplifies the positive impact of strategic consensus on contextualized innovative behavior and strengthens the mediating effect of scenario-based innovation behaviors, thus helping enterprises break through the digital pilot dilemma. The theoretical contribution of this study lies in enriching the research on enterprise digital transformation at the employee level by comprehensively considering the influence of employee cognition and behavioral factors on enterprises' breaking through the digital pilot dilemma, and revealing the mechanism of this process. Furthermore, by examining the role of contextualized innovative behavior, this study expands the connotation and application of the context-driven theoretical perspective, verifies the mediating role of employee contextualized innovative behavior between employee strategic consensus and the scope of enterprise digital application, and reveals the path of strategic consensus influencing the scope of enterprise digital application. Finally, this study delves into the scenarios under which strategic consensus can better stimulate contextualized innovative behavior, thereby expanding the scope of enterprise digital application.