Sut I Wong - Professor at BI Norwegian Business School

In this talk, we present our research on the concept of digital mindset, which reflects employees’ individually-held, general beliefs regarding personal and situational resources in the context of technological change. Specifically, we suggest that employees’ beliefs regarding the extent to which their technological ability is fixed versus malleable (resulting in fixed or growth-oriented beliefs) and the extent to which they believe situational resources to be limited or expandable (resulting in zero- or expandable-sum beliefs), in combination, comprise their digital mindset. We draw from social cognition research to argue that the beliefs that comprise employees’ digital mindset could be particularly important for making sense of and shaping their responses to digital transformation initiatives, which involve a high degree of complexity and ambiguity. Further, we elaborate how employees’ digital mindset will go on to shape the extent to which they see digital transformation initiatives as providing opportunities and resources for professional growth, or encroaching on their ability to display competency and retain work resources, and how this, in turn, will influence the extent to which they engage in (or perhaps withdraw from) digital transformation initiatives. We illustrate our predictions with examples provided by employees and managers experiencing the technological change and uncertainty at work.

Sut I Wong is professor of communication and leadership at BI Norwegian Business School and an adjunct faculty at University of Ljubljana. She is also a Director of Nordic Centre for Internet and Society at BI. She received her PhD in Organizational Psychology from BI Norwegian Business School, and a DBA from Catholic University of Portugal. She was also a research scholar in SCANCOR at Stanford University and Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Sut I’s research interests center on leadership, employee proactivity, team innovation and performance. She has developed a gap model, which addresses the expectation and perception differences between leaders and followers. Her current research focuses on the role of leadership in better engaging employees in organizational change, such as digitalization, as well as on how ideal leadership models may influence the interaction between leaders and their followers during change.

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