Digital Transformation and Sustainability Performance: The Mediating Roles of Adhocracy Culture and Green Innovation in the Turkish Automotive Industry

This study examines how digital transformation (DT) is associated with environmental, economic, and social sustainability performance, and whether these associations are partly transmitted through adhocracy organizational culture (AOC) and green innovation (GI). Grounded in the Dynamic Capabilities View, we propose a parallel mediation model in which AOC and GI are theorized as reconfiguring mechanisms linking digital capability to sustainability outcomes. Cross-sectional survey data from 351 white-collar professionals in the Turkish automotive industry were analyzed using PLS-SEM. Because respondents reported on attributes of their own organizations without firm identifiers, all constructs capture individually reported perceptions of organizational characteristics, and the results describe associations among these perceptions rather than validated firm-level effects. DT was positively associated with all three sustainability dimensions, with the smallest direct coefficient for social sustainability. Both AOC and GI showed significant specific indirect paths to all three outcomes, a pattern consistent with complementary partial mediation. For social sustainability, the point estimate of the indirect path through AOC (β = 0.182) was larger than the direct DT–SSP coefficient (β = 0.131), although the difference between the two was not formally tested, and social sustainability performance was measured with a three-item scale of comparatively modest internal consistency, so this pattern should be read with caution. The study contributes to the debate on digitalization and triple-bottom-line sustainability by showing that, in this sample, the DT–sustainability association is neither purely technological nor purely cultural, and by extending the Dynamic Capabilities View to all three sustainability dimensions. For managers, the findings suggest that digital initiatives accompanied by a flexible, experimentation-oriented culture and green innovation activity are associated with more favorable perceived sustainability outcomes; longitudinal and multilevel designs are needed before causal or firm-level conclusions can be drawn.