Job Satisfaction and the Digital Transformation of the Public Sector: The Mediating Role of Job Autonomy

• Published date: 01 September 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X221148403
• Author: Julia Fleischer,Camilla Wanckel
• Date: 01 September 2024

https://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X221148403

Review of Public Personnel Administration

2024, Vol. 44(3) 431 –452

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/0734371X221148403

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Article

Job Satisfaction and the

Digital Transformation of the

Public Sector: The Mediating

Role of Job Autonomy

Julia Fleischer1 and Camilla Wanckel1

Abstract

Worldwide, governments have introduced novel information and communication

technologies (ICTs) for policy formulation and service delivery, radically changing

the working environment of government employees. Following the debate on work

stress and particularly on technostress, we argue that the use of ICTs triggers “digital

overload” that decreases government employees’ job satisfaction via inhibiting

their job autonomy. Contrary to prior research, we consider job autonomy as a

consequence rather than a determinant of digital overload, because ICT-use accelerates

work routines and interruptions and eventually diminishes employees’ freedom to

decide how to work. Based on novel survey data from government employees in

Germany, Italy, and Norway, our structural equation modeling (SEM) confirms a

significant negative effect of digital overload on job autonomy. More importantly,

job autonomy partially mediates the negative relationship between digital overload

and job satisfaction, pointing to the importance of studying the micro-foundations of

ICT-use in the public sector.

Keywords

digital transformation, digital overload, job autonomy, job satisfaction, civil service survey

Introduction

The digital transformation of work radically changes the working environment of pri-

vate and public sector employees. Similar to the private sector, many governments

1University of Potsdam, Germany

Corresponding Author:

Julia Fleischer, University of Potsdam, August-Bebel-Straße 89, Potsdam 14482, Germany.

Email: fleischer@uni-potsdam.de

1148403ROPXXX10.1177/0734371X221148403Review of Public Personnel AdministrationFleischer and Wanckel

research-article2022

432 Review of Public Personnel Administration 44(3)

have adopted ICT tools to support and improve information exchange and communi-

cation and to digitize existing procedures for policy formulation and service delivery

(Christensen & Lægreid, 2022). In addition to online collaboration tools, social plat-

forms and messenger services have entered the daily routines of government organiza-

tions, altering the very context of policy formulation (Fusi & Feeney, 2018b; Fusi &

Zhang, 2020; Hwang et al., 2020; Tufts et al., 2015). However, the increasing use of

ICTs also creates new demands for government employees’ cognitive resources as

work processes and communication accelerate (Karr-Wisniewski & Lu, 2010; Tarafdar

et al., 2010). As a result, the same features that turn ICTs into valuable and beneficial

tools for government employees to accomplish their tasks may cause detrimental

effects for their autonomy and their satisfaction at work.

The scholarly debate on “technostress” discusses these unintended effects of using

ICTs at work (Berg-Beckhoff et al., 2017; La Torre et al., 2019; see already Brod,

1984; Weil & Rosen, 1997). Similar to other work stressors, technostress causes harm-

ful psychological, behavioral, and physiological responses (see Lazarus, 1966).

Eventually, these stressors and the corresponding response mechanisms are likely to

cause negative work-related attitudes and decrease job satisfaction (Baehler & Bryson,

2008; Kim, 2005). Already widely acknowledged for private sector employees, these

detrimental effects on job satisfaction have also been confirmed for government

employees engaged in service delivery (Ayyagari et al., 2011; Ragu-Nathan et al.,

2008; Tarafdar et al., 2010; see also Corbett et al., 1989).

The current scholarly debate on job satisfaction emphasizes the importance of

working environments and job characteristics and identifies a positive effect of job

autonomy on job satisfaction (Cantarelli et al., 2016). At the same time, scholars inter-

ested in the effects of ICT-use at work on job satisfaction show that employees with

greater job autonomy are more resilient to technostress (Suh & Lee, 2017). Hence, job

autonomy is almost exclusively regarded as a determinant or precondition of poten-

tially detrimental effects of ICT-use at work (Karimikia et al., 2020, cf. Plimmer et al.,

2022). In contrast, we follow self-determination theory and argue that the association

between ICT-related stress at work and job satisfaction is partly mediated by job

autonomy. Accordingly, we regard job autonomy as a consequence of stress triggered

by ICT-use, following empirical studies that show how the impact of context features

on workplace outcomes is driven by the innate need for autonomy (Deci et al., 1989,

2017; Gagné & Deci, 2005).

We focus on “digital overload” that generates changes in working routines and

behavior of employees because they use ICT tools at work themselves (“techno-over-

load”) and because their work-related third parties use ICTs (“communication

overload”).

We fielded a survey of middle-ranked government employees performing manage-

rial and policy functions in three European countries, Germany, Italy, and Norway,

which express different administrative traditions and administrative systems. We focus

on digital overload to capture the effects of using ICT tools at work and employed

structural equation modeling to study how this digital overload shapes job autonomy

and eventually job satisfaction. In our empirical analysis, we found a significant