Digital Transformation and Organizational Resilience in the Turkish Hospitality Sector: The Mediating Role of Strategic Agility and the Moderating Effect of Digital Leadership Toward Sustainable Tourism Management

Abstract

The rapid advancement of digital technologies and the increasing frequency of organizational disruptions have made digital transformation and organizational resilience central concerns for hospitality management research and practice. Drawing on Dynamic Capabilities Theory and upper echelons theory, this study develops and tests a dual-stage moderated mediation model examining the associations between digital transformation and organizational resilience through the mediating role of strategic agility, and the moderating role of digital leadership on both the digital transformation and strategic agility association and the strategic agility and organizational resilience association. Data were collected from 436 managers employed in 4- and 5-star hotels across major Turkish tourism destinations, and hypotheses were tested using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS 4. The results confirm that digital transformation is positively and significantly associated with both organizational resilience and strategic agility, and that strategic agility is positively associated with organizational resilience. Strategic agility partially mediates the digital transformation and organizational resilience association, while digital leadership significantly moderates both the digital transformation and strategic agility association and the strategic agility and organizational resilience association, amplifying these associations under high digital leadership conditions. A formal moderated mediation test confirmed that the indirect effect of digital transformation on organizational resilience through strategic agility varies significantly across levels of digital leadership (index of moderated mediation = 0.027, p = 0.023). These findings advance the application of Dynamic Capabilities Theory to hospitality resilience research, enrich the strategic agility and digital leadership studies, and offer actionable insights for hotel executives and policymakers navigating digital transformation in disruption-prone tourism environments. While sustainability was not directly measured, the findings theoretically position digitally enabled agility and organizational resilience as sustainability-relevant outcomes contributing to the long-term viability of hospitality operations.