Dynamic Leadership Competencies for Enabling Construction 4.0: A Case of China
The concept of Construction 4.0 signals a transformation from the digitalisation of isolated tasks towards the reconfiguration of processes, business models, and professionals’ interactions. Yet, digital transformation in the construction industry remains slow and uneven, with leadership increasingly recognised as a critical enabler. Existing studies have largely focused on leadership roles and styles, offering limited insights into the concrete competencies required to support digital transformation. This research addresses the gap by identifying and validating the leadership competencies for Construction 4.0, and by examining how the importance and performance vary across organisational management levels and digital maturity contexts. The study focuses on China’s construction industry, which offers a valuable context due to its scale, complexity, and uneven transformation progress. A mixed-methods design was adopted, integrating a systematic literature review, semi-structured interviews with senior construction managers, and a large-scale survey. The research first synthesised existing knowledge on leadership and digital transformation to develop a preliminary framework of 22 leadership competencies grouped into four domains: Cognitive, Interpersonal, Business and Strategic. This framework was then refined to be 25 leadership competencies through semi-structured interviews with 13 senior managers, who also revealed organisational barriers shaping the implementation of digital transformation in practice. Building on these qualitative insights, a questionnaire was developed to assess three components: digital maturity, the importance of competencies, and the performance of competencies. These data enabled the identification of critical competencies and performance gaps among the management levels and variations associated with digital maturity. Quantitative analysis revealed that while most of the 25 competencies were regarded as important, significant gaps exist between importance and performance, with particularly pronounced gaps in the business and strategic domains. Across management levels, general staff face significant shortfalls in communication and strategic awareness; line managers underperform in coordination, policy implementation, and financial management; middle managers struggle with tolerance of innovation failure and interpreting digital strategies; while senior managers exhibit gaps in digital literacy, team motivation, and market research and evaluation. In addition, digital maturity is identified as a critical contextual factor shaping leadership performance, with higher maturity levels associated with stronger competency enactment. Two contrasting patterns emerged: foundational competencies (Acting Ethically, Conscientiousness, Team Building and Coordination, Collaboration, and Trust-building) remain relatively stable across all clusters, whereas transformation-driven competencies (Open-mindedness and Tolerance of Failure, Critical Thinking, Innovative Thinking and Courage, Learning Agility, Market Research and Evaluation, and Stakeholder Management) are highly contingent on digital maturity level. This research constitutes one of the earliest systematic and empirically grounded investigations of leadership competencies for Construction 4.0. Theoretically, it develops a comprehensive competency framework that underpin digital transformation and demonstrates how leadership requirements and performance vary across organisational management levels and digital maturity contexts. Furthermore, it extends the leadership literature by demonstrating that management levels and digital maturity operate as key situational determinants shaping how leadership competencies are prioritised and enacted in practice. Practically, the research provides detailed insights into the leadership competencies critical for digital transformation in construction, offering guidance on what capabilities to develop, for whom, and in what sequence, by aligning competency priorities with organisational management levels and digital maturity. Ultimately, these findings inform both theoretical understanding and the design of leadership development initiatives to support digital transformation in construction organisations, not only in China but also in other similar construction markets.
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