How to Get Employees and Teams
Ready for Digital Transformation?

Khoi Nguyen and Thijs Broekhuizen

Introduction video

While human capital is crucial to digital transformation, little is known about employee digital readiness, and how this may foster digital transformation. This chapter conceptualizes employee digital readiness and postulates its drivers and consequences. Based on a literature review, we highlight two distinct patterns that promote psychological and behavioral outcomes of digital readiness. The psychological pattern suggest that firms can reduce technological anxiety by providing organizational support that enhance employee’s capability. The behavioral pattern shows that in order to improve effective use, firms should enhance collegial support and enhance the appropriateness of digital tools, which will increase the usefulness of digital transformation. Finally, we introduce a team perspective and conceptualize how employee digital readiness affects outcomes by relating
the focal member’s digital readiness to the team’s digital readiness. We hypothesize possible psychological and behavioral outcomes based on whether the focal employee and team have high or low readiness, and suggest remedies in case of (mis)fit situations.  Download the chapter here.