Strategic leaders driving innovation through digital transformation: an exploratory study in the South African trade, catering, and accommodation sector

Abstract

The accelerating pace of digital transformation has reshaped business models and innovation pathways in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment. Businesses are grappling with strategic responses, often acknowledging the paradox and complexity associated with innovating while adapting to rapid technological change, which has become essential for ongoing survival. It is within this dynamic context that the mechanisms which strategic leaders employ to explore innovation though digital transformation remain underexplored. Therefore, this study investigates how strategic leaders drive innovation through digital transformation within South Africa’s Trade, Catering and Accommodation (TCA) sector industries that are inherently customer-centric and have been significantly affected by post-pandemic disruption and continued digital acceleration. Adopting a qualitative, exploratory research design, this researcher interviewed seventeen leaders involved in digital transformation initiatives across trade, accommodation, and catering industries. Purposive sampling was used to identify information-rich cases, and the data were thematically analysed, using a conceptual leap approach to move back and forth from raw insights to broader explanation. The findings confirms that strategic leaders enact their roles through a combination of vision setting, people alignment, and disciplined execution, supported by integrated competencies including digital literacy, learning agility, empathy, and relational influence. Moreover, the findings show that digital transformation and innovation are bidirectionally linked, with each enabling and reshaping the other through leadership action. While barriers such as legacy systems, cultural inertia, and change fatigue persist, leaders convert these into enablers through human-centred practices, iterative learning, and sense-making. Worth noting is that this study extends existing theory by positioning strategic leadership as an integrative mechanism that aligns technology, people, and culture to produce value-driven innovation. It also adds to the existing body of knowledge by showing how leaders in emerging customer-service industries humanise digital transformation through relational influence, empathy, and disciplined execution, which remains an area for future research. The final conceptual framework reflects both the literature and the empirical insights, offering a contextually grounded view of how leadership shapes digital-driven innovation.