Psychological empowerment, employee digital competence and innovative work behaviour

Abstract

In the digital economy, companies must become more effective at quickly creating, modifying, and providing products and services that can meet customers' constantly changing needs. Given the extremely competitive and dynamic business climate of the telecom industry, innovation has emerged as a crucial driver of growth and survival. Innovation in organisations is driven by the ingenuity and creativity of its employees; hence organisations and leaders are continuously looking for ways to harness the qualities of innovative work behavior (IWB) and understand its determinants. Innovation demands fundamentally that employees in the organisation have the intrinsic motivation, mindset, required competencies and the willingness to promote innovation. To this end, this cross- sectional study focused on an SA telco organisation, with the aim to investigate the mediating effect of psychological empowerment (PE) on the relationship between employees’ digital competence (EDC) and employees’ innovative work behavior (EIWB). The study evaluated the intricacies of this mediation process, seeking to uncover if PE influenced the association between EDC and EIWB. Data was collected from a sample 358 employees working across six business units (BUs) in a single telco through the use of a self-administered online survey questionnaire. The BUs that were accessible had to be limited to a certain number and selected upfront, hence a non-probability purposive sampling approach had to be used. Covariance-Based Structural Equation Modeling (CB-SEM) was used to analyse the data. The study's findings revealed all constructs (EDC, EIWB and PE), had a significant positive relationship with each other, and the PE partially mediated the relationship between EDC and EIWB. The findings implies that developing competencies like DC in employees, tends to have a positive influence on their self-motivation and attitude towards their work, which in turn could result in higher levels of IWB. Future researchers could conduct a longitudinal study, which tends to work more effectively for mediation models, as well as evaluate different types of mediation models (serial, multi), as well as introducing moderators like leadership style.