Digital workplace transformation in the financial service sector: Investigating the relationship between employees' expectations and intentions

Abstract

Digital workplace transformation goes beyond the adoption or non-adoption of technologies – it has far deeper effects in the context of re-designing a workplace. Future digital work implies not only a change of tools used in work activities, but it also often changes the very nature of the working activities and processes. Psychological needs of employees are important in this context: the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness which affect the employees' motivation to accept the future workplace. More specifically, if employees have expectations that digital environment will enable them to accomplish better performance, bigger satisfaction and personal well-being more easily, they will be more motivated to support digital transformation. Thus, in our study we aim to investigate whether employee involvement, well-being and support to digital work foster digital transformation of the workplace. In doing so, we close the existing gap in literature and confirm that interpersonal relatedness in digital work environment has a significant influence on employees' performance and well-being. This, in turn, increases employees’ intentions to support digital workplace transformation. We believe this study will help pre-digital organizations to rethink their strategies according to employee involvement to respond to the challenges of digital transformation. The study also encourages scholars to investigate whether and how those factors are shaped differently due to COVID-19 pandemic context.