Digital transformation and digital entrepreneurship in kuwaiti government: the impact of personal skills and data literacy on performance

This study aims to investigate how individual digital skills and data literacy shape digital performance in the public sector in Kuwait through the role of digital entrepreneurship, reflecting employees’ ability to drive change in government digital transformation. Whereas prior research on government digital transformation has concentrated on technological infrastructure and on Western or East Asian settings, little is known about how employees’ capabilities are converted into performance within the hierarchical bureaucracies of the Gulf region; this study addresses that gap with evidence from Kuwait. A questionnaire was administered to 573 government employees working across multiple ministries in Kuwait, and the data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The results indicate that problem-solving skills had a strong positive influence on business intelligence performance (β = 0.461, p < 0.001), while digital communication and collaboration significantly influenced data analysis skills (β = 0.292, p < 0.001). Digital entrepreneurship emerged as a key predictor of government digital performance (β = 0.299, p < 0.001), and both data management skills and data analysis skills contributed significantly to predicting government performance outcomes. Critically, the effects of business intelligence and digital ethics on performance operated exclusively through digital entrepreneurship, identifying employees’ entrepreneurial initiative as the central mechanism that converts data literacy into governmental digital performance. The findings imply that public sector capacity-building policies in Kuwait and the wider MENA region should pair cognitive-skill and data literacy training with structural mechanisms that activate entrepreneurial behavior, rather than relying on investment in digital infrastructure alone.