Do digital literacies matter in employee engagement in digitalised workplace?
| Published date | 25 March 2021 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JABS-08-2020-0318 |
| Date | 25 March 2021 |
| Pages | 523-540 |
| Subject Matter | Strategy,International business |
| Author | Ai Joo Chan,Lai Wan Hooi,Kwang Sing Ngui |
Do digital literacies matter in employee
engagement in digitalised workplace?
Ai Joo Chan, Lai Wan Hooi and Kwang Sing Ngui
Abstract
Purpose –This study aims to understandthe role of digital literacies as a moderator between employee
engagementand its antecedents, namely,workplace digitalisation and innovativeculture.
Design/methodology/approach –A total of 256 valid samples were used in the analysis. The
respondents were individuals used as management-levelexecutives in companies located in Selangor/
Kuala Lumpur.The model was tested using structuralequation modelling.
Findings –The findings reveal that there exists a significant as sociation between employee engagement and
its antecedents, namely, workplace digitalisation and innovative culture. Digital literacies are found to
moderate the relationships between workplace digital isation-employee engagement and innovative culture-
employee engagement.
Practical implications –This paper provides new insight to the practitioners about the role of digital
literaciesin raising employee engagement in the digitalworkplace.
Originality/value –These findings enrich theliterature on employee engagement, whereby, improving
employee digital literacies strengthens employee acceptance to workplace digitalisation and benefit
from theinnovative culture to stay engaged.
Keywords Employee engagement, Digital literacies, Innovative culture,
Workplace digitalisation
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Employee engagement has been linked to the various positive organisational outcome and
individual employee outcomes, such as productivity, innovation (Sla
˚tten and Mehmetoglu,
2011); organisational commitment (Hanaysha, 2016); financials, customers, safety and quality
(Gallup, 2017), creativity, proactivity, productivity, well-being (Albrecht, 2010) and employee
well-being (Bakker and Demerouti, 2018;Hakanen et al.,2018;Pogrebtsova et al., 2017). Albeit
the perceived benefits of employee engagement, the volatile economic climate has made efforts
to improving employee engagement more challenging. Organisations continue to explore
various initiatives to reduce costs and improve profitability for survival. One of the ideas is
workplace digitalisation.
Workplace digitalisation taps on digital technologies (Lilja, 2020) as supporting tools or
automating tools in the businesses. Digitalisation at the w orkplace alters the job design, job
resources and job expectations of employees, hence, are believed to infl uence employee
engagement (Bridger, 2018;Ellis, 2019;Guillot, 2017;Oldham and Da Silva, 2015;Raj, 2018).
The Covid-19 pandemic intensifies workplace digitalisation (Lund et al.,2020) as business
survival as various unprecedented restrictions on travel, physical interactions and change of
consumer behaviours forcing organisations to operate in the contactless environment. Despite
that employees have been forcefully or voluntarily accepting the changes consequential to
workplace digitalisation, the concern if employees remain motivated and engaged at work, is
significantly less investigated (Lilja, 2020;Silic and Back, 2016). To our knowledge, the few
Ai Joo Chan is based at the
Faculty of Business, Design
and Arts, Swinburne
University of Technology,
Sawarak Campus,
Kuching, Malaysia.
Lai Wan Hooi is based at
College of Management,
Chang Jung Christian
University, Taiwan.
Kwang Sing Ngui is based
at the Faculty of Business,
Design and Arts,
Swinburne University of
Technology, Sarawak
Campus, Kuching,
Malaysia.
Received 16 August 2020
Revised 31 October 2020
Accepted 6 December 2020
DOI 10.1108/JABS-08-2020-0318 VOL. 15 NO. 3 2021, pp. 523-540, ©Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1558-7894 jJOURNAL OF ASIA BUSINESS STUDIES jPAGE 523
studies mentioned earlier (Bridger, 2018;Ellis, 2019;Guillot, 2017;Oldham and Da Silva, 2015;
Raj, 2018) produced mixed results, which warrant continuous exploration of how workplace
digitalisation influences employee engagement.
In the reality, efforts to improve employee engagement are falling short (Bridger, 2018)
globally. Besides puzzling and struggling to engage employees effectively (Bridger, 2018),
organisational culture is named hindering the efforts to boost employee engagement
(Bridger, 2018). Bridger (2018) commented that the organisations tend to focus to deliver
financial results in meeting the expectationof investors and little wonder how the employees
feel at work.
Plenty of literature put up that organisational culture (Camer on and Quinn, 2011; Harper, 2015;
Imperatori, 2017;Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004) influence employee engagement. As
organisational culture is reported to hinder efforts to improve employ ee engagement in the
practice (Bridger, 2018), together with workplace digitalisation, this study revisits the
relationships between innovative culture and employee engagement. Wor kplace digitalisation,
being a form of technology innovation (Griffith and Ruber a, 2014), is the embodiment of
innovative culture, a culture that promotes innovation.
Studies have also acknowledged the gap in understanding the moderating factors of
employees’ acceptance of digitalisation (Hwang et al., 2016) and the post-adoptive
behaviours with new job design Bala and Venkatesh, 2016). Therefore, there is a call to
examine the dynamic nature of employees’ well-being (in this study, the employee
engagement) through the acceptance of digital technologies, as well as how individual
differences are related to the acceptance of technology tools (Lilja, 2020). Individual
differences arising from the digital literacies difference play a significant role in interacting
with how positive employees accepting digital technologies and the perceived benefits of
digital technologies in supporting their work, for them to stay engaged at work. This is
especially more important when the workforce today is made up of digital natives (who are
born in the digital age) and digital immigrants (who adopts and adapts to digital toolsat the
later stage of their lives), whohave different digital literacies.
Hence, this paper sets out to study the interaction of digital literacies on employee
engagement in the working environment of workplace digitalisation and innovative culture-
centric workplace. This studyaims to address the research objective as follows:
䊏to examine the relationship between workplace digitalisation –employee engagement
and innovative culture –employee engagement; and
䊏to investigate whether digital literacies moderate the relationship between workplace
digitalisation –employee engagement and innovative culture –employee engagement.
The study findings contribute significant knowledge to the discipli ne of employee engagement
by enriching the existing body of literature if workplace digitalisation influences employee
engagement. Secondly, this study explores the effect of innova tive culture on employee
engagement. Finally, this study ascertains if digital literacies mode rate the relationship
between workplace digitalisation, innovative culture and their engagement. The findings o f this
study help organisations to leverage workplacedigitalisation and optimise innovative culture to
improve employee engagement. Engaged employees are likely to focus on their w ork, low
turnover intention and positive to do better jobs towards organisati onal excellence and
sustainabilities.
2. Theoretical underpinnings and hypotheses
2.1 Job demand-resources model
This study used the job demands-resources (JD-R) model (Bakker and Demerouti, 2017;
Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004) to develop the hypotheses and build the research model. The
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