Leadership and Digital Transformation: Development of a Digital Transformation Resistance Assessment Tool and its Application in a European Pharmaceutical Company

The purpose of the article is to identify the main areas of top management's resistance to digital transformation (DT) from literature, develop a digital transformation resistance assessment tool, test it on a European medium-sized pharmaceutical organizations and provide recommendations. The approach consists of a thematic analysis of existing literature and application of the well-established multidisciplinary Framework Method for qualitative research synthesis in order to extract 6 main areas of resistance to DT, each containing several coded factors, which were then distilled into a set of 28 questions within a DT resistance assessment tool. The tool was tested through semi-structured interviews in a European medium-sized pharmaceutical organization and the results were verified through an exploratory Principal Component Analysis for potential validity of the proposed thematic constructs. The 6 main categories of resistance identified from literature were strategic alignment, tactical and resourcing, business model, internal environment, DT appetite and individual. The interviews revealed a highly divergent perceptions of DT and structural, cultural, and strategic challenges. The tool can only be employed if a leader with leverage within the company initiates it. This implies that the positive positioning of this sponsor towards DT already influences the other leaders' positioning. Additionally, the tool does not provide explicit recommendations for reducing leadership resistance, to increase their buy-in.Practical implications – The tool measures DT resistance, as well as offers a lens into managerial beliefs as a predictor of digital transformation outcomes and proves to be a reliable foundation for a series of recommendations.Originality/value – Additional to previous research, this paper focuses on DT resistance of top management, providing a deeper understanding of the main barrier to the initiation of DT in organizations and a foundation for developing a strategy to enable DT endeavors.