The Role of Cultural Values for Digital Transformation: Insights from a Delphi Study

The rapid advancement of digital technologies has fundamentally changed the competitive dynamics of industries. To cope with an increasingly unstable environment and to fully leverage the opportunities opened by new technologies, organizations need to transform their businesses. Digital transformation initiatives are prevalent throughout industries, yet often experience failure due to inert organizational cultures preventing change. We adopt a value-centric approach to organizational culture to identify cultural values critical for digital transformation success. Our exploratory Delphi study with 25 research and industry experts resulted in twelve identified cultural values. The results point to an ideal combination of two culture types of the competing values framework, emphasizing values that foster innovation and concern for people. With the identification of an ideal target culture for cultural change initiatives, we extend the knowledge in IT-enabled business transformation literature and lay the foundation for future research on the role of culture in digital transformation