The Role of Digital and Ethical Managerial Competencies in the Development of Corporate Digital Responsibility: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Digital transformation confronts organizations with responsibilities that extend beyond technical compliance, including data protection, cyber resilience, fairness in automated decisions, accessibility, transparency and digital sustainability. Corporate digital responsibility (CDR) refers here to the values and norms guiding responsible digital practices, while CDR practices refer to their observable implementation. Existing frameworks have clarified principles, activities and levels of responsibility, yet they offer uneven explanations of how managers’ digital and ethical capabilities jointly become organizational mechanisms supporting implementation. This paper asks: how, and through which organizational mechanisms, can digital and ethical managerial competencies foster CDR practices? It develops a conceptual model through a narrative, theory-oriented synthesis of the academic and institutional materials cited in the paper, complemented by a targeted bibliographic update through October 2026. The narrative synthesis uses a reasoned selection of academic and institutional sources to compare theoretical perspectives and articulate a testable conceptual framework. The framework connects two families of managerial competencies with responsible digital governance and a digital ethical culture. These are proposed as potentially partial mediators, while cross-pathways remain plausible. Digital maturity and stakeholder pressure are discussed as contextual moderators whose effects must be tested rather than assumed. Eight research propositions distinguish individual managerial resources from collective organizational mechanisms and organizational-level responsible practices. The article's distinctive contribution is not to establish causal effects, but to specify a testable explanation of the translation of managerial judgment and digital literacy into rules, shared routines, monitoring and stakeholder-responsive actions. It also makes explicit the risks of construct overlap, reverse causality and different regulatory environments. Future testing could combine multilevel surveys, longitudinal observations and case studies with structural equation and conditional-process analyses. The proposed relationships form a theoretical research agenda and remain open to empirical examination and competing explanations.

JEL Classification: M12; M15; M14. 

Paper type: Theoretical Research.