Beyond Engagement: Causal Links Between Digital Transformational Leadership and DevOps Productivity in Hybrid Fintech Teams Using Trace Data

Abstract

The post-pandemic normalization of hybrid work has increased the importance of leadership quality, coordination architecture, and tool-enabled management in software-intensive firms, especially in fintech organizations where software delivery speed and reliability are tightly linked to customer trust, compliance, and competitiveness. However, much of the existing leadership literature still relies on perceptual or self-reported outcomes rather than objective engineering outputs. This paper addresses that gap by proposing a quasi-experimental, multi-method framework to examine whether digital transformational leadership causally affects DevOps productivity in hybrid fintech teams using trace data.

The model links digital transformational leadership to objective software delivery outcomes through two mediating mechanisms, namely psychological safety and coordination quality, while testing whether hybrid intensity and AI tool maturity moderate these relationships. The proposed research design integrates organizational trace data from version control systems, pull-request workflows, CI/CD pipelines, incident logs, and on-call systems with validated survey instruments, including the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire and Utrecht Work Engagement Scale. The empirical approach combines difference-in-differences estimation around leadership transitions and hybrid policy changes with multilevel regression, mediation analysis, event-study testing, reliability testing, and qualitative triangulation.