Disentangling the Mechanism of Digital Transformation on Organizational Creativity: The Role of Organizational Learning

Organizational creativity is important to the survival and success of organizations. How to stimulate organizational creativity is thus a highly relevant issue. In the digital era, more and more organizations are engaging in digitalization, which has been considered to have great potential in nurturing organizational creativity. However, we still lack theory-driven empirical inquiries into “black box” between digitalization and organizational creativity. Drawing upon organizational learning theory, we introduce organizational learning to understand how organizations adapt to digitalization to improve organizational creativity. Using 194 responses from managers and senior IT employees, the results of polynomial regression analysis uncover the effects of the congruence types, the effects of incongruence, and the effects of the incongruence types between organizational unlearning and organizational relearning on organizational creativity. Digitalization is also found to affect organizational unlearning and organizational relearning positively. Key findings and implications are also discussed.