| In the era of digital innovation,enhancing sustained competitive advantage through digital transformation and improving innovation performance are crucial for firms.However,Chinese firms are currently facing a dual challenge of how to achieve digital transformation and how to improve innovation performance.On the one hand,firms want to transform,but do not know how to transform.Digital transformation has become the main theme for the future development of the vast majority of firms.However,the digital transformation of most firms has not achieved the expected results.On the other hand,firms want to innovate but have achieved poor performance.In recent years,Chinese firms have gradually increased their emphasis on technological innovation and research and development investment.However,there are still prominent issues of insufficient innovation capability and low innovation performance.The development and application of digital technology have provided great innovation opportunities for firms,and have become an important way for firm innovation.However,it is still unknown whether and how the application of digital technology can improve a firm’s innovation performance.Digital orientation is the key to solving the aforementioned challenges.Digital orientation is a guiding principle for firms to pursue the opportunities brought by digital technology to achieve competitive advantages,and it is also a prerequisite and strategic direction for firms’ digital transformation.Establishing a digital orientation is the top priority for firm digital transformation,which helps firms break through the bottlenecks of slow transformation and poor performance.As an emerging theme in the field of digital transformation and strategic orientation,the important role of digital orientation has gradually attracted the attention of scholars.However,the understanding of digital orientation in existing literature is still limited.On the one hand,there is still a significant gap in the research on the driving factors of digital orientation,especially at the top management team level.Digital orientation can provide direction for firms to develop and implement specific digital transformation strategies.Therefore,exploring the driving forces of digital orientation is crucial for both academia and business practices.Firm practice has shown that the digital orientation of firms is mostly proposed and promoted by top management teams.The top management team is a key decision-maker in the firm and plays a decisive role in establishing a digital orientation.According to the upper echelons theory,the characteristics of the top management team are a direct reflection of their potential experience,cognitive foundation,and values,which determines the strategic development direction of the firm.Therefore,the characteristics of the top management team can directly affect a firm’s digital orientation.However,few studies have focused on the impact of top management team characteristics on the digital orientation of firms.On the other hand,there is still a lack of theoretical connection and empirical evidence between digital orientation and innovation performance.The existing literature mainly studies the impact of digital orientation on corporate financial and environmental performance,lacking attention to innovation performance,especially the exploration of its intermediary mechanisms and boundary conditions.Moreover,there is still a lack of theoretical connection between digital orientation and innovation performance.Therefore,dissertation investigates the impact of digital orientation on innovation performance and its mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions,and establishes a theoretical connection between digital orientation and performance through the VRIO(Valuable Rare Inimitable and Organization,VRIO)framework of resource-based theory.The purpose of digital transformation for firms is to establish a sustained competitive advantage in a highly volatile digital environment,thereby achieving outstanding performance.This dissertation regards digital orientation as the “O”(Organization)in the VRIO framework.Digital orientation can help firms achieve excellent performance by effectively developing and utilizing heterogeneous resources.Based on the above research gaps,this dissertation takes 26162 annual financial reports of Chinese A-share listed companies as research samples to comprehensively explore the driving role of top management team characteristics on digital orientation of firms,as well as the impact of digital orientation on firm innovation performance.This dissertation divides the research content into three sub studies based on the antecedentconsequence logic,as well as specific research questions.Sub study 1 comprehensively explored the impact of dispersion characteristics(including education level diversity,tenure diversity,and age diversity),aggregation characteristics(including average education level,average age,and average tenure),and background characteristics(including overseas/financial background diversity and proportion of overseas/financial background executives)on digital orientation in top management teams.Sub study 2explored the direct impact of digital orientation on firm innovation performance and its mediating mechanisms.Sub study 3 explored the moderating effect of multiple boundary conditions such as property rights,family businesses,business scale,and equity incentives on the relationship between digital orientation and innovation performance from a corporate governance perspective.Based on this upper echelons theory,resource-based theory,and strategic orientation literature,this dissertation proposed 20 research hypotheses,and then tested the hypotheses using large sample panel data from 3131 listed companies,computer-aided text analysis methods,and bidirectional fixed effects models.Finally,multiple endogenous and robust methods such as instrumental variable method,Heckman twostage model,propensity score matching,sample replacement and variable analysis were used,the regression results were tested.The research conclusion indicated that,firstly,multiple characteristics of top management teams can significantly affect digital orientation.Specifically,diversity of education levels and average education level have a positive impact on digital orientation,while average age and tenure have a negative impact on digital orientation.Diversity of overseas/financial backgrounds and the proportion of overseas/financial executives have a positive impact on digital orientation.Secondly,digital orientation helps firms improve innovation performance,and increasing R&D investment is the “bridge” for digital orientation to improve innovation performance.Finally,compared to non-state-owned and family-owned firms,the digital orientation of state-owned and non-family-owned firms has a stronger positive effect on innovation performance and R&D investment.The larger the scale of the firm and the strength of equity incentives,the stronger the promoting effect of digital orientation on innovation performance and R&D investment.The research findings provide rich insights for firms and their managers who want to gain sustained competitive advantages from a digital orientation.The main research contributions and innovations are as follows: Firstly,this dissertation establishes the new structure and vocabulary of digital orientation,providing clearer guidance for the conceptualization and operationalization of digital orientation.Secondly,by comprehensively exploring the impact of top management team characteristics on digital orientation,the driving factors of digital orientation at the top management team level were discovered,expanding the research boundary of the upper echelons theory in the digital content.Once again,by exploring the direct impact of digital orientation on innovation performance and its mediating mechanism,the mechanism by which digital orientation “guides” innovation has been explored,and the theoretical connection between digital orientation and firm performance has been established,which supplements the literature on the influencing factors of firm innovation.Finally,by exploring multiple boundary conditions that regulate the relationship between digital orientation and innovation performance,the research boundary of digital orientation was expanded from the perspective of corporate governance.It supplements the research on digital orientation in the context of China,and also enriches the application research of social emotional wealth theory in the digital content. |
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