DIGITAL OR INNOVATIVE: UNDERSTANDING “DIGITAL LITERACY – PRACTICE – INNOVATIVE WORK BEHAVIOR” CHAIN

Digital transformation has put tremendous pressure on employees to innovate with the use of information tech-nology (IT ). This paper explores the extent to which dig-ital literacy and personal innovativeness contribute to individual's innovative work behavior (IWB). To test our hypotheses, we apply double bootstrapping chained mediation analyses paired with relative importance analysis on a dataset collected from employees (N = 167) in a pharmaceutical company. The results showed the existence of a double-mediation chain whereby dig-ital practices and attitude toward digitalized innova-tion mediate the positive relationship between digital literacy and IWB. Surprisingly, said chain was not sup-ported for personally innovative individuals, indicating that digital literacy plays a relatively more important role in stimulating attitudes toward digitalized inno-vation and IWB. Our findings add further specificity to research on digital natives and may help organizations understand the role of digital literacy and personal in-novativeness in organizationally-relevant outcomes, such as IWB.