The Interplay of Digital Responsibility and Digital Transformation: Empirical Insights from a Nationwide Digital Transformation

As digital transformation progresses, research broadens its perspective to not only focus on the positive effects but also on the adverse impacts of the increasing use of digital technologies. Against this backdrop, the issue of being responsibly digital moves to the foreground in research and practice. The need for further research on the conceptualization of digital responsibility and its role in the context of digital transformation has been indicated by the literature. In this paper, we empirically investigate the interplay of digital responsibility and digital transformation in the context of large-scale digital transformation. Based on our results, we derive four core contributions for IS theory as we highlight the prime role of digital responsibility in contemporary digital transformation processes, refine the conceptualization of digital responsibility in the context of digital transformation, propose six dynamic interplays of digital responsibility and digital transformation, and present promising avenues for further research on this increasingly relevant phenomenon.