How Does Enterprises’ Digital Transformation Impact the Educational Structure of Employees? Evidence from China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a nice paper that looks at whether digital transformation may change the composition of talent of enterprises.

There are some concerns about identifying this causal effect. First, the availability of talent in an enterprise may encourage that enterprise to adopt more digital technology. There could be unobserved factors that drive both digital transformation and talent composition. The paper carefully addresses these identification issues using an IV regression and propensity score matching, which is to my satisfaction.

The paper offers some discussion on why this effect might take place in Section 5.

The writing is good, but with some editorial errors, e.g, the ambiguity of terms such as "serve employment", the missing"the", etc. May I ask the authors to engage editorial assistance to clean up the manuscript before resubmission. 

Congratulations on this fine piece of work.

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

First I would like to congratulate the authors for such a robust analysis. Further, I would like to highlight a few points :

1. Literature support can be strengthened by adding research papers on Impact of Digitalization on Organization performance.

2. Theoretic backdrop however authors have talked about it but not illustrate and support it throughout the paper

3. Contribution of the study is not clearly presented

4. Results needs support from previous studies

5. Research gaps are not explicitly stated

6 Further, the last section is required greater attention and can be described by adding contributions from methodological, practical, and conceptual dimensions, future research areas can be more clearly aligned with limitations and what best practices have been observed in the literature regarding the digital transformation of an organization should also be highlighted.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The main concern about the manuscript is its contribution to knowledge. It is expected that a critical gap analysis will be done in the introduction section to justify the necessity of doing this piece of research. It is partially done by the authors but it should consider all aspects of the problem including assumptions, limitations and constraints, pros and cons, and relative merits to the other publicly available studies and proposals.

The discussion section needs to be described scientifically. Kindly frame it along the following lines:
i. Main findings of the present study;
ii. Comparison with other studies;
iii. Implication and explanation of findings;
iv. Strengths and limitations.

Please consider citing the following studies while improvement of your manuscript.

Chaveesuk, S., Khalid, B., Bsoul-Kopowska, M., Rostańska, E., & Chaiyasoonthorn, W. (2022). Comparative analysis of variables that influence behavioral intention to use MOOCs. PLOS ONE, 17(4), e0262037. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262037

Chaveesuk, S., Wutthirong, P., & Chaiyasoonthorn, W. (2018). Cloud Computing Classroom Acceptance Model in Thailand Higher Education’s Institutes. Proceedings of the 2018 10th International Conference on Information Management and Engineering - ICIME 2018. https://doi.org/10.1145/3285957.3285989

It is suggested that the conclusion section be much better organized. This section should be presented in one or two 250-300 word paragraphs.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review the manuscript titled "How Does Enterprises’ Digital Transformation Impact the Educational Structure of Employees? Evidence from China". I found the paper to be of interest. The findings make a good contribution to the knowledge. Specifically the authors have found that technological advancements and digital transformations of the enterprises impact the structure of the human capital with the  higher need in employees with undergraduate degrees and lower need in the employees with Secondary school degree.

I believe that this manuscript will benefit form a more sound grounding in the Sustainable HRM and Future of work literature. I think that the authors can draw on these literature in the introduction to state the problem more clearly. Also, these literature can be used in the literature review.

Also, I think that theoretical background section needs further work. Currently, Transaction cost theory does not seem to create a good foundation for the hypotheses. In the Discussion section the authors provide a more nuanced use of the Human capital theory to explain the findings, I was wondering why this theory was not used for the hypotheses development. Also, the RBV could be an additional theory to be used for hypotheses development. Overall I suggest to strengthen the theoretical background section and maybe review the use of the transaction cost theory as currently it does not sound compelling.

I was not sure that there is a need in both Hypothesis 3 and 4 as they are essentially opposite statements. I would suggest to strengthen the theoretical part and choose one of these two hypotheses.

I would suggest to separate results and discussion. Also, results perhaps could be presented more succinctly with some tables been moved to supplementary materials.

In the discussion it would be interesting to present a more nuanced discussion on the meaning and implications of the results. Can these results be of interest outside China? Why? I would also suggest to provide a separate section on practice implications perhaps. Here the implications can be for both organisations and education system.

A more nuanced discussion of the lack of impact on employees with postgraduate  degrees could also be of use.

 I think this is an interesting paper which opens a discussion around the impact of technology on employees and employees' response and maybe even resilience in the face of rapid technological changes.

Finally, proofreading is highly recommended.

I wish the authors good luck!

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review the revised version of the Manuscript. I would like to thank the authors for making changes and I feel that the new version presents the argument in a clearer manner.

I have the following suggestions:

1. Although the authors have introduced the idea of sustainable HRM in the Discussion section, I would suggest to present it earlier, perhaps in the Introduction. I believe that the works of Ehnert (Aust) whom the authors cite could be useful here. These works are grounded in the system thinking and link HRM practices exercised in organisations to the outcomes for the external environment and then back to the implications for organisations (feedback loops).  I think this understanding of sustainable HRM is quite relevant to what the authors discuss, as digital transformation in organisations seem to have implications for society and communities (e.g. lay offs) which can further impact sustainability of organisations. The authors may have a look at the works of Mariapannadar as well. I believe this will help to link the paper more to the objectives of the Journal.

2. I'm still not fully convinced in the usefulness of Hypothesis 4, moreover it is not well justified.

3. I believe that both theories (Transaction cost with capital specificity and RBV) could be used to justify all the hypotheses, not only 5 and 6

4. I suggest to remove any references to theory in results presentation (I have found it quite unusual to present and discuss theory in the results section), the authors might use theoretical sections from Results to enhance the Theoretical background of the study and the Discussion. That way Results section will just present results in relation to hypotheses.

5. I liked how the authors outlined the theoretical contribution of the study - marginal contributions can be included in this section I believe.

6. It would be good to return to the concept of involution in the discussion section more explicitly, as it seems to be an important concept for this study.

7. In Hypothesis 1 'positive impact' does not make much sense to me, as it is quite difficult to evaluate the change in the talent structure as positive or negative. Positive for whom? Perhaps the authors need to explain more what they see as a positive change.

8. Section 5 "Mechanism Research" - it was not clear to me what is meant by this - Mediation analysis?  This section is a mix of theoretical background, results and discussion. I would suggest to revise this section, move theoretical background to the theoretical background (together with the Figure 8), results to Results and Analysis section, and some parts can become a part of Discussion. It is also not clear why there are no mediation hypotheses which are then tested in this section. Could the authors please introduce the mediation hypotheses in the theoretical background and then just present the results? I believe it will also make a results section more concise and straight to the point. I would suggest to review the Results section and maybe move some parts to the Supplementary materials or appendices.

I hope the authors will find my suggestions useful. Good luck!

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review the revised version of the manuscript. I would like to thank the authors for their efforts in revising this paper and addressing reviewers comments.

Minor:

Lines 211-212: Even if the relationship between digital trans-211 formation and employment scale is hotly debated [8]. - The sentence seems to be incomplete.

Lines 214-216 : After the integration of manufacturing enterprises and digital technologies, the proportion of low-skilled employment decreases significantly, the longer the integration time, and the proportion of low-skilled  employment decreases [12]. - Maybe: the integration time is increased

Lines 254-255: To analysis the impact of digital transformation on employees with GDR and SDR is 254 quite complex. - the sentence needs re-writing.

Lines 697-698: That is, whether their jobs are valuable, rare, costly-to-imitate,  and non-substitutable. - The sentence seems incomplete.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thanks for your positive and constructive comments on our manuscript. We have carefully revised our manuscript according to your suggestions, and revisions are presented as follows:

 

1. Lines 211-212: Even if the relationship between digital transformation and employment scale is hotly debated [8]. - The sentence seems to be incomplete.

Response:

We have revised this sentence as "However, the relationship between digital transformation and employment scale is hotly debated."

 

2. Lines 214-216 : After the integration of manufacturing enterprises and digital technologies, the proportion of low-skilled employment decreases significantly, the longer the integration time, and the proportion of low-skilled  employment decreases [12]. - Maybe: the integration time is increased.

Response:

We have revised the sentence as "After manufacturing enterprises apply digital technologies, the proportion of low-skilled employees decreases significantly, and these substitution effects generated by digital technologies are strengthened with time."

 

3. Lines 254-255: To analysis the impact of digital transformation on employees with GDR and SDR is 254 quite complex. - the sentence needs re-writing.

Response:

We have revised this sentence as "To analyze the impact of digital transformation on employees with GDR and SDR, we need to further study the characteristics of specificity. "

 

4. Lines 697-698: That is, whether their jobs are valuable, rare, costly-to-imitate,  and non-substitutable. - The sentence seems incomplete.

Response:

We have revised this sentence as "For employees and graduates, that is, higher degrees may not always bring satisfier jobs, so they are not supposed to blindly engage in the “involution.” "

 

Meanwhile, we have adjusted the number of references to make sure they are in order.

 

Once again, we thank you very much for reading our paper carefully and providing these beneficial suggestions to improve our manuscript!

 

Kind regards,

 

Yituan Liu

Yabin Bian

Wenhao Zhang