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Organizational innovation is an inexhaustible driving force for business development (Pizzi et al., 2021). Digital technology has been critical in reaching business goals, leading to innovation products, services, processes, and business models (Cloos & Mohr, 2022). At present, a new round of technological revolution and industrial change is flourishing (Rodrigues et al., 2022). Big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence are representative of a new generation of digital technology to accelerate the penetration of the main modes of operation of human life. Organizational innovation has brought profound change to economic and social development in a deep digital era (Busulwa et al., 2022).
Scholars in the field of innovation also emphasize the influence of social-network ties on the innovativeness of companies (Basov, 2020). According to social-ledger theory, there are both positive and negative ties in the organizational environment. Previous studies have suggested that positive ties in social networks (e.g., opinion seeking, knowledge transfer, trust, or friendship) enable individuals to benefit from professional networks and are a benefit for innovation capability (Alshareef et al., 2020). Conversely, negative ties may contain aversive, avoidant, hostile, or difficult working relationships that burden individuals and negatively influence organizational innovation (Lai et al., 2020). However, recent research on work relationships points to the possibility of friendly relationships between individuals and their competitors, ambivalent relationships between friends and foes, or even conflicting relationships between colleagues seeking advice, considered a phenomenon of dissonant ties (Brennecke, 2020). More importantly, due to the rise of emerging technologies such as big data, cloud technology, and artificial intelligence, industrial businesses are struggling with digital transformation, and a large body of research in the innovation field has begun to consider the role of digital transformation in the organizational innovation process (Stornelli et al., 2021). It also considers the impact of digital transformation on innovation output through networking resources (Leon et al., 2020). Recent studies suggest that three core capabilities of digital transformation capability (DTC)—digital sensing, digital seizing, and digital reconfiguring—may have different impacts on organizational innovation performance (Ghosh et al., 2022). Therefore, exploring the relationship between positive and negative ties and organizational innovation and clarifying the impact of dissonant ties on organizational innovation under different DTCs has become a critical issue.