Abstract:     In recent years, digital economy has developed rapidly in countries around the world and has become an important driving force to the global economic development. In this context, digital transformation has become an important strategic choice for enterprises to adapt to the changes in the external environment and reshape their competitive advantages. Digital transformation is a comprehensive, systematic and continuous strategic transformation process in strategic positioning, organizational structure, production and operation, business model and other modules by using digital technology. It can transform management and operations, optimize business processes, and improve the way an enterprise captures and creates values. From the perspectives of industrial policy, digital technology, industry competition pattern and consumer demands, scholars have emphasized the reasons why institutional pressure and the “legitimacy” of external environment drive the high willingness of enterprises to digital transformation. However, few literatures have focused on the subjective initiative of change forces within organizations, and some research only focused on the digital leadership model, digital platform construction and digital culture. However, it failed to pay attention to whether and how entrepreneurial orientation affects the digital transformation of enterprises, which is the focus of strategic choice theory.The core hypothesis of strategic choice theory points out that an organization′s strategic decision-making behavior is determined by the actors and the organization′s previous cognitive framework, which exists in the form of embedded thinking patterns and values.The mental models of innovativeness, initiative and risk taking of entrepreneurial orientation not only describe the decision-making tendency of the organization to pursue new fields and creative activities, but also contribute to the analysis of the overall spiritual atmosphere of the enterprise.It is a key factor to cope with the double pressure of complex and changeable external environment and organizational rigidity in the context of digital transformation.Therefore, based on the data of Chinese A-share manufacturing listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2007 to 2019, machine learning method was used to characterize the degree of digital transformation of micro enterprises, and the influence of entrepreneurial orientation and enterprise digital transformation was discussed based on the strategic choice theory. From the perspective of strategic decision context, the influence of internal resources (redundant resources and political capital) and operating environment (performance expectation gap) on the above relationship was further analyzed. The findings are as follows:(1) entrepreneurial orientation promotes strategic coordination among top management teams, breaks the obstacles to transformation with heroic determination and courage, accelerates the process of enterprise digital transformation, and reveals the endogenous driving factors of enterprise strategic transformation; (2) Redundant resources have different situational effects on the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and digital transformation due to their different nature. Precipitated redundant resources weaken the promoting effect of entrepreneurial orientation on digital transformation, while non-precipitated redundant resources enhance the promoting effect of entrepreneurial orientation on digital transformation. (3) Political connection can rely on future potential resources and strengthen the effect of entrepreneurial orientation driving enterprises to implement digital transformation; (4) Since the fear of "failure" puts their preferences in a risk-averse state, the performance expectation gap will weaken the role of entrepreneurial orientation in promoting digital transformation. The theoretical contribution of this paper lies in three aspects: First, from the perspective of enterprise entrepreneurship orientation, in order to explore the internal reasons for the different choices of enterprises′ digitalization strategies in the same institutional environment, this paper made up for the lack of research on the motivation of manufacturing enterprises′ digitalization transformation from the internal subjective initiative of enterprises, and provided new insights for revealing the internal motivation of enterprises′ digitalization transformation actions. Second, it analyzed the impact of redundant resources and political connections on enterprise digital transformation strategy driven by entrepreneurial orientation, which enriches the research on digital strategy from the resource-based perspective. Third, this paper regarded the performance expectation gap as a situational factor driving the entrepreneurial orientation to digital transformation of enterprises. Different from the existing research results, it was found that although the performance expectation gap can trigger the problem search of enterprises, the threat rigidity caused by it still cannot be underestimated. From the perspective of the threat rigidity theory, this study has complemented the literature on strategic choice of firms that take the performance expectation gap as a situational variable.

Key words: entrepreneurial orientation, enterprise digital transformation, redundant resource, political connection, performance expectation gap