CEOs play a central role in the digitization of firms. However, the impact of CEO characteristics on digital transformation has typically been examined in isolation, without consideration of their combined effects. The purpose of this paper is to examine the combined influence of CEO characteristics on digital transformation.
Using the panel data of the listed manufacturing firms in China from 2007 to 2022, this paper conducted the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to test the proposed hypotheses.
The research results demonstrate that digital transformation depends on a complex combination of CEO characteristic (CEO gender, CEO age, CEO education and CEO duality) and firm characteristics (firm size, firm age, firm leverage and state ownership). In particular, the first kind of combination is CEO education*CEO age*CEO duality, which is appropriate for firms that are larger, older and high leverage. The second kind of combination is ∼CEO education*CEO age*∼CEO gender, which is appropriate for firms that are older and state-owned.
This paper makes the following contributions. Firstly, this paper contributes to upper echelon theory by examining the combined effect of CEO characteristics on digital transformation. Secondly, this paper contributes to the digital transformation literature by identifying multiple valid combinations of CEO characteristics that drive the digitization of a firm. Thirdly, this paper also contributes to upper echelon theory by identifying the contingent context of the combinations of CEO characteristics. The research results also provide important practical implications. Firstly, firms seeking to achieve digital transformation ought to use a comprehensive approach when selecting and hiring CEOs. Secondly, for policymakers, they should to pay attention to differentiated supervision of different firms since the optimal combination of CEO characteristics will vary from one firm to another.
