Navigating Tensions in Digital Transformation: Managerial Action Across Levels

Digital transformation promises incumbent firms new ways to compete and create value, but the journey there is shadowed with tensions. This dissertation asks: How do managers in incumbent firms navigate tensions when leading digital transformation? Three interconnected studies build the answer. The first, a systematic review of 109 articles, highlights a framework on how managers use paradoxical, convergence, and legitimacy framing to resolve cognitive tensions across sensing, seizing, and transforming. The second, a longitudinal case study of PetCo, distinguishes commensalistic from rivalrous resource tensions in ecosystem diversification, showing how each triggers distinct patterns of distributed leadership, from peer-level coordination among middle managers to coordination across hierarchical levels. The third examines artificial intelligence adoption, uncovering distinct challenges across generative and predictive AI and highlighting middle managers as pivotal actors in scaling AI across three phases. Together, these studies advance a multi-level understanding of digital transformation: one where success depends not only on strategic vision from the top, but on how managers across the hierarchy actively navigate cognitive, resource, and technological tensions in practice.