Digital transformation as an efficiency-driven organizational change process: evidence from logistics managers

Abstract

This study examines how digital transformation initiatives shape operational efficiency and organizational change in the logistics sector from a managerial perspective. It conceptualizes digitalization not as a purely technological shift, but as a socio-technical change process that reconfigures organizational routines and coordination mechanisms. A qualitative case study design was adopted. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with managers in logistics and customs brokerage firms operating in Istanbul, Turkey's primary logistics hub. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis, moving from first-order empirical codes to higher-order theoretical dimensions. The findings reveal that digital transformation drives organizational change across four interrelated dimensions: (1) structural efficiency gains through enhanced information security and accelerated processes, (2) strategic customer orientation enabled by increased transparency and responsiveness, (3) workforce transformation characterized by more flexible and skill-oriented resource utilization and (4) organizational tensions, including data standardization issues, employee resistance and bureaucratic inertia. These dimensions are interpreted not as independent outcomes but as manifestations of efficiency rationalization: a generative organizational logic that actively restructures routines, redistributes authority and produces constitutive tensions. This study's primary contribution is to reconceptualize efficiency as a generative mechanism of organizational change rather than as a performance outcome of digital transformation. By specifying the pathways through which efficiency-oriented pressures restructure routines, redistribute authority and reconfigure workforce arrangements in logistics and customs brokerage firms, the study advances a process-oriented theory of digitalization that extends beyond existing accounts by explaining not only what changes but how the logic of efficiency rationalization drives those changes. The findings also contribute to the organizational tensions literature by showing that efficiency-driven reconfiguration simultaneously produces structural gains and organizational frictions, including workforce reduction pressures, employee resistance and institutional constraints, that must be understood as constitutive features of digital transformation rather than as deviations from it.