The Determinants of Readiness of Digital Transformation among Malaysian Digital Talents

Yap, Alina May Ling (2022) The Determinants of Readiness of Digital Transformation among Malaysian Digital Talents. Final Year Project (Masters), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

Digital transformation entails the strategic transformation of all aspects of the business, the creation of a new ecosystem in which technology creates and delivers value to stakeholders, and the ability of the business to adapt more quickly to changing circumstances through the use of new and updated digital technologies. In digital transformation era, digital talents and digital technologies plays a vital role in the organisations. In this paper, the term of “digital talents” will be referred to the employee who are employed in the organisation in any industry which have the basic digital skills (e.g., email, messaging and social media). However, most companies in Malaysia that undergoing digital transformation encounter the shortage issue of human resources with digital capabilities and who are completely prepared for digital transformation. Besides, most Malaysians are lacking of digital skills and unfamiliar with the digital technologies led to the demand for digital expert (employee that prepared and completely developed their skills and capabilities in digital) continues to grow as a consequence of organisations' inability to prepare their workforce. This is expected to worsen the employee readiness of digital transformation, while the issue of digital expert scarcity would stymie Malaysia's digital economy's progress. To implement the research objectives, quantitative research design was employed and the online questionnaire survey was adopted. A sample of 450 employees (digital talents) was gathered as a source of primary data from various industries in Malaysia. The data was then analysed by using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM SPSS) version 28 and Partial Least Square – Structural Equation Modelling (Smart PLS) version 3.2.8. Based on the outcomes generated from the analysis, all the direct and indirect relationships between readiness of digital transformation and self-efficacy, attitudes toward digital transformation, digital literacy, digital organisational culture as well as social influence are significantly supported. In addition, the result also proved that the direct relationship between digital organisational culture and attitudes toward digital transformation would be weaker when there is strong autocratic leadership. In Malaysia, many companies practise autocratic leadership, thus it is an awareness to the organisation to employ the autocratic leadership in the organisation, as it will ruin the digital organisational culture and demotivate the employees’ attitudes toward digital transformation.