The impact of organizational learning behavior on digital transformation in SMEs: The mediating role of managerial support—Evidence from Spanish wineries

While existing research identifies managerial support as a critical antecedent of digital transformation, the origins of this supportive intent remain under-explored. Integrating Upper Echelons Theory and Absorptive Capacity Theory, this paper uses technology-agnostic organizational learning—general learning routines not specific to digital technologies—as an entry point to uncover the sources of managerial support for digitalization, and examines the mediating role of this support between such learning and digital transformation. This study empirically tests the proposed theoretical model by applying Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to survey data from 321 wineries in the Spanish wine industry. The results indicate that both external communication and internal training are significantly and positively associated with managerial support, uncovering the organizational learning sources of such support. Managerial support partially mediates the relationships between organizational learning behavior and digital adoption, confirming its theoretical positioning as both an outcome and an explanatory variable. External communication and internal training thus play complementary roles in the digitalization process, corresponding respectively to knowledge acquisition and knowledge assimilation. This paper extends beyond the common treatment of managerial support as a purely independent variable, revealing its mediating role as both an outcome and an explanatory variable. It provides a theoretical explanation from the perspective of organizational learning behavior for the persistent lag in transformation intent among traditional SMEs. In practice, the findings emphasize that wineries must not only identify opportunities through external scanning but also transform fragmented knowledge into organizational capability through institutionalized internal training, with managerial support serving as the strategic hub linking learning to digital change.