Exploring factors driving employees’ innovation passion in the context of enterprise digital transformation – a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis

Purpose While innovation passion serves as the internal driving force for employees to embrace digital transformation, the challenge lies in how to ignite it. In the context of digital transformation, employees’ innovation passion emerges from interdependencies between organizational and individual factors. This study aims to examine the configurational effects of these multilevel factors. Design/methodology/approach Applying the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis method, this study analyzes data collected from 670 employees of State Grid Corporation of China to reveal the complex antecedent mechanisms that differentiate employees with high versus non-high levels of innovation passion. Findings This study demonstrates that no single antecedent constitutes a necessary condition for high innovation passion. Furthermore, five equifinal pathways that contribute to high innovation passion and three pathways that result in non-high innovation passion have been identified. In addition, this study ascertains the key role of structural empowerment at the organizational level and digital literacy at the individual level in stimulating employees’ innovation passion. Originality/value First, this study enriches the literature on employees’ innovation passion by situating it within the prevalent yet underexplored context of digital transformation. Second, moving beyond traditional net-effect analysis, it develops a cross-level framework that integrates organizational and individual factors to elucidate their configurational effects on igniting innovation passion. Most significantly, this study advances self-determination theory by recalibrating the “competence” need into technological and psychological dimensions as well as by challenging the theory’s conventional principle of non-substitutability. Practically, this study offers practical guidance and flexible options for managers to ignite employees’ innovation passion, presenting five equivalent configurations that can be tailored to different organizational needs.