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Introduction
Digital service companies are currently facing several challenges. These challenges are diverse, ranging from the strategic and operational levels to issues of people management. The operational challenges include the need for ongoing organizational transformations as a result of technological acquisitions and the adoption of new technologies and business models (Berman, 2012). Christensen (1997/2013) suggested that a change in technology can give new entrants a significant advantage, therefore existing companies need to constantly update. Consequently, low levels of satisfaction are often reported among the employees (Bersin et al., 2017). Moreover, the digital service industry is racing toward automation and digitalization – focusing on the delivery of big data and security services – and employees do not possess the right skills to support the changing business portfolio. When such global organizations are diversified and include different businesses through acquisitions, there are coordination problems (Goold and Campbell, 2002). In these settings, change management is a critical organizational skill set, dealing with the entrenched inability of organizations to adopt behaviors that would allow them to embrace new technologies (Flanding et al., 2018). A lack of knowledge leads to high costs, lower profit margins and slow proliferation of automation and industrialization. Transition and transformation projects are challenged financially; the processes are complex. These factors result in dissatisfaction among the employees and lead to many employees sitting through the change. However, an attempt to change can have a positive or negative impact on attitude and productivity (Weber and Weber, 2001; Piderit, 2000). In such complex settings, most change efforts fail (Rafferty et al., 2013), and this alone is the main reason for taking a new and careful theoretical approach to those transformations to which extant theories are not easily applied (Robinson, 2019). In this study, we consider a top-down approach to change management since this change dynamic is the most typical for digitalization-induced organizational transformations, which are often results of the new strategy implementation at the organizational level. However, the change supportive behavior is important for successful implementation of planned change (Miller et al., 1994; Rafferty et al., 2013), and therefore, we study the internal enablers affecting employees' attitudes toward change, i.e. what enables employees to facilitate organizational change.
While the failure to successfully...