Digital Fluency – A Facilitator of Digital Work Performance?

The digitalization of the workplace appears to be both a curse and a blessing for organizations as the pervasiveness of digital technologies can have opposite effects on individual work performance. To be successful in the digital age, it is, therefore necessary for organizations to promote and exploit factors that enable digital work performance. However, empirical research on facilitators of digital work performance is scarce. We address this research gap by conceptualizing and testing a resource that enables employees to effectively perform in a digitalized work environment: digital fluency. Drawing on the ability-motivation-opportunity framework, we propose that employees’ digital fluency, which consists of digital knowledge and digital self-efficacy, positively affects employees’ digital work performance. We further argue that leaders’ and coworkers’ digital fluency moderates the relationship between employees’ digital fluency and their digital work performance. We find support for the positive effect of employees’ digital fluency on their digital work performance and the moderating effect of leaders’ digital fluency in a multisource and time-lagged sample of 232 employees and 17 leaders from a medium-sized German technology company.