A perfect couple or an arranged marriage?

Several organisations have introduced a new leadership role, the Chief Digital Officer (CDO), as a centralised role in their top management team (TMT), charged with accelerating and coordinating their digital transformation. While previous research suggests a complementary, close alignment between the CDO and the Chief Information Officer (CIO), role redundancies and the struggle for recognition and resources also point to an inherent tension. We offer insights into the quality of CIO-CDO collaboration based on role, TMT collaboration, conflict theory, and a dyadic design approach of 11 CIO-CDO relationships with 33 expert interviews in two waves. Our findings suggest that the relationship between CIO and CDO is not always as complementary as assumed in the literature; instead, in the vast majority of our dyads, there is too much role conflict to achieve close alignment, leading to separation behaviour between the roles. We identify involvement in the introduction of the other role, the demand-side orientation of the CIO, and the supply-side orientation of the CDO as important contingent factors that determine the quality of the CIO-CDO relationship. If the CIO-CDO relationship is not perfect, a unified Chief Digital and Information Officer (CDIO) role might better address the challenges we found in the dyads in our sample. Our findings expand the understanding of the CIO-CDO relationship.