Managing the digitalization of companies internationally: The role of culture, tensions and business models

Digitalization and related technologies are creating numerous opportunities and changes that companies must embrace in order to remain competitive. In this context, the successful digital transformation in companies from manufacturing industries requires suitable strategies to benefit from investments in digitalization. However, many companies have not yet succeeded in doing so, partly because they are approaching digitalization too narrowly. For internationally operating companies in particular, it is important to reconcile digitalization with a multinational environment. This dissertation therefore explores relevant contextual factors, mechanisms and outcomes of digitalization from a management perspective, going beyond operational approaches. To this end, three studies were conducted, which form the core of the dissertation. First, Study 1 clarifies what holistic management of digitalization towards high digital maturity involves, identifying various components within digital activity, digital business, and operational and dynamic capabilities. In this context, the study examines the role of national culture as a contextual factor for digital maturity along Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions. National culture was placed at the center of this analysis, as it shapes the decisions and behavior of employees and has hardly been addressed in the literature on digitalization. The results from a survey with 603 manufacturing companies show that high collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation and restraint support digital maturity, which implies that national culture has a significant influence on digitalization in companies apart from the dimensions of power distance and masculinity. On this basis, companies are recommended to heed national culture as a determinant of digitalization in their global strategies. Study 2 deals with further contextual factors in the global environment of companies. It looks at how, among other things, geopolitical changes towards protectionism, the pressure to become more sustainable and the emergence of new growth markets lead to paradoxical tensions for companies’ international operations. As a strategy for dealing with this, mechanisms of digital platforms and the resulting opportunities for increased international cooperation in ecosystems are explored and examined in a study of 286 internationally active automotive companies. The results from structural equation modeling confirm the suitability of platforms to mediate tensions across countries but also show potential for optimization in the context of unexploited platform effects such as data-based learning using artificial intelligence (AI). Accordingly, Study 3 focuses specifically on the digital technology of AI. It shows, based on theory, how AI can overcome previous limitations in terms of learning, but also in terms of companies’ scale and scope. On this basis, it further explores how AI can improve the business models of companies. A survey of 250 internationally active automotive companies confirms, among other things, some of the potential. However, it also reveals that the companies’ business models have not yet benefited sufficiently from learning by means of AI, justifying the need for future research at this point. Thus, the dissertation provides important insights into contextual factors on a global level, mechanisms, especially along digital business models and platform-based ecosystems, as well as desired outcomes of digitalization in companies. In particular, the management of internationally operating manufacturing companies can be given guidelines that allow them to sharpen their digital, global strategies on this basis, while new fields of action related to digitalization can be derived for research.