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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1455250

Linking workplace digitalization to work engagement: evidence from China public sector organizations

Provisionally accepted
Xiaohui ZHAN Xiaohui ZHAN 1*Shenghua Xie Shenghua Xie 2*
  • 1 University of Jinan, Jinan, China
  • 2 Central China Normal University, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The construction of "Digital Government" has greatly facilitated the workplace digitalization in the public sectors of China. Workplace digitalization has become a pervasive phenomenon in modern organizations, including the public sector. Existing research on the impact of workplace digitalization on individual behavior has yielded conflicting results, making the impact of workplace digitalization on employee work engagement remains a subject of debate and investigation. Based on the transactional theory of stress, this article aims to examine how workplace digitalization influences government employees' work engagement through different appraisals (i.e. challenge and threat) and the moderating role of a personal trait (i.e. digital literacy).Methods: Structured questionnaires and a three-wave research design were used to collect data. A total of 290 employees from public organizations in Guangdong Province, in China, participated in the study. SPSS and MPLUS were used to analyze the data using the latest bootstrapping and process macro techniques.Results: The results show that workplace digitalization can produce both beneficial and detrimental impacts on work engagement of government employees via challenge and threat appraisals, respectively. The digital literacy of government employees was confirmed to moderate the impacts of perceived workplace digitalization on stress appraisals (i.e. challenge and threat).Our study proposes a theoretical framework that explain the mixed impacts of workplace digitalization on government employees' work engagement via challenge and threat appraisals. It also offers practical suggestions to public sector and managers on how to balance the challenge and threat aspects of digitalization in the workplace.

    Keywords: workplace digitalization, Challenge appraisal, Threat appraisal, Digital Literacy, work engagement, Government employee

    Received: 27 Jun 2024; Accepted: 15 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 ZHAN and Xie. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Xiaohui ZHAN, University of Jinan, Jinan, China
    Shenghua Xie, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, 430079, Hubei Province, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.