If and where: Environmental antecedents of CDO adoption

Abstract

The opportunities and challenges of digital transformation lead many firms to adopt the position of a chief digital officer (CDO). Prior studies have started investigating the antecedents of CDO presence. However, they do not directly distinguish between CDOs positioned at the top management team level and CDOs located at lower levels of the organizational hierarchy. Additionally, pressures arising from a firm’s external environment have not been considered comprehensively and in detail from a theoretical as well as an empirical point of view. Our study addresses these points by performing panel data regression analyses on publicly listed German firms between 2016 and 2019. Our results indicate that the effects of environmental antecedents vary significantly for CDOs at different hierarchical levels.