The Impact of Enterprise Digital Capability on Employee Sustainable Performance: From the Perspective of Employee Learning

Abstract

Background: Enterprises’ digital transformation is an important issue in the digital era. Exploring how digital transformation can be implemented successfully within enterprises is of considerable theoretical and practical significance. From the perspective of employee learning, this study focuses on employees and aims to establish the theoretical linkage between employees’ perception of enterprise digital capability and their sustainable performance. Methods: A survey using the random sampling technique was adopted to collect data from a large professional data platform. A multi-wave survey featuring 433 full-time Chinese employees was conducted using path analyses to test the hypotheses. Results: The results of the path analyses showed that: (1) employee learning and unlearning mediate the relationship between employees’ perception of an enterprise’s digital capability and their sustainable performance; (2) communication feedback strengthens the positive effects of perceived enterprise digital capability on learning, as well as on unlearning; and (3) the integrated moderated mediation model is valid. Conclusion: This paper proves that during enterprises’ digital transformation, employees’ perception of the enterprise’s digital capability promotes employee sustainable performance via both learning and unlearning. Communication feedback strengthens the above relationships. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature on digital transformation and highlights employee-learning-related organizational management issues, shedding light on the practice of enterprise digital transformation.