Leadership and supply chain excellence in the age of digitalization: a scoping review and research agenda

Purpose This study aims to examine the role of leadership in enabling supply chain excellence (SCE) in the context of digital transformation. We identify key leadership traits, responsibilities, and mechanisms that support the successful deployment and sustainment of SCE, offers a clear conceptualization of SCE as the strategic integration of people, processes, and technology to achieve performance excellence. Design/methodology/approach The study employs a scoping review methodology to systematically analyze 56 rigorously sourced peer-reviewed publications from multiple leading databases, ensuring comprehensive coverage, quality, and academic credibility. Drawing on Dynamic Capabilities Theory, we synthesize existing literature on leadership practices, digital enablers, and operational strategies to develop an integrated conceptual model linking leadership with supply chain excellence for digital transformation. Findings The findings of this study highlight that effective leadership, particularly transformational and digitally competent leadership, is critical for aligning digital initiatives with strategic supply chain objectives. Leadership plays a central role in sensing opportunities, seizing digital innovations, and transforming organizational capabilities. Core leadership responsibilities include setting vision, fostering innovation, developing talent, and enabling cross-functional collaboration. The study also identifies key challenges, including resistance to change and digital skill gaps, and emphasizes the critical role of leadership in mitigating these barriers. Additionally, we highlight the recursive relationship between leadership and capability development, in which leadership drives continuous improvement while emerging capabilities reinforce leadership effectiveness. Research limitations/implications The study is limited by the constraints of the scoping review approach, reliance on past literature, and the absence of statistical synthesis. These limitations suggest future research opportunities to use mixed methods approaches, broaden data sources, and conduct more rigorous empirical validation. Practical implications The proposed framework serves as a diagnostic and developmental tool for researchers and practitioners seeking to align leadership strategies with digital supply chain objectives. It enables organizations to identify and cultivate essential leadership traits, such as digital literacy, emotional intelligence, and change management, and align them with investments and performance metrics across strategic, tactical, and operational levels. Ultimately, the study supports organizations in building adaptive, resilient, and digitally enabled supply chains that can sustain excellence. Originality/value This study contributes to the literature by developing an integrated conceptual model that explicates how leadership enables SCE in the digital era. We address fragmentation in prior research by clearly defining leadership competencies and responsibilities that enable digital transformation. Furthermore, we adopt a systems-oriented perspective that links leadership behavior with organizational and technological enablers, offering a practical approach for digital readiness and supply chain transformation.