Turning strategy into employee adaptive performance: why empowering leadership matters in turbulent digital transformation

Purpose This study examines why formal strategic planning does not always become employee action during digital transformation and environmental turbulence. It proposes that strategic plans are associated with stronger adaptive performance when perceived implementation is translated into empowering leadership and psychological empowerment. Design/methodology/approach Three-wave survey data from 1,000 employees in nine Chinese enterprises are analyzed using employee-level OLS models with organization fixed effects and HC3 standard errors, bootstrap estimates of the conditional indirect associations, and cluster-robust and random-forest sensitivity checks. Findings At the employee level, perceived strategic planning implementation is positively associated with empowering leadership, psychological empowerment and adaptive performance in sequence, and retains no detectable direct association with adaptive performance once the pathway is modeled. Digital transformation intensity strengthens the first two links, whereas environmental turbulence strengthens the final link. Practical implications Managers should convert strategic priorities into bounded decision rights, resources and feedback rather than relying on communication alone: creating room for local experimentation under intensive digital change, and shortening approval chains under turbulence. Originality/value Rather than introducing a new construct, the study extends existing strategic leadership and empowerment research contextually. Its contribution is stage specificity: digital transformation intensifies translation and internalization, whereas environmental turbulence intensifies enactment, locating two distinct failure points in strategy execution.