MANAGING THE SYSTEMIC INTERRELATING OF COMPETING CONCERNS

Abstract

Incumbent firms that undergo digital transformations in an attempt to remain rele-vant in an increasingly digital world often find themselves having to deal with com-peting concerns as the existing logics of the firm clash with new logics introduced as part of the transformation. These competing concerns are systemically interrelated and require a cohesive management strategy. To our knowledge however, existing literature tend to focus on either the systemic interrelating of competing concerns or managerial responses to manage competing concerns, while failing to address how managerial responses are implicated in the systemic interrelating of competing con-cerns. By using these two strands of literature as our theoretical lens and combining them, we identified how managerial responses rendered competing concerns salient in a certain sequence: 1) innovation focus, 2) innovation capabilities, 3) innovation collaboration and 4) innovation governance. The managerial response to a compet-ing concern had direct implications that caused another competing concern to be-come salient. Based on these findings we propose that future studies further investi-gate the relation between managerial response and digital transformations.