The mediating role of occupational stress: a missing link between organisational intelligence traits and digital government service quality

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the mediating role of occupational stress in addressing the missing gap between organisational intelligence (OI) traits and digital government service quality.Design/methodology/approachBy employing multistage cluster sampling, a total of 394 responses from the Malaysian service providers at federal government agencies were obtained. For data analysis, the partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach with a disjoint two-stage approach was employed to assess the proposed higher-order model. The analysis was carried out to examine how occupational stress mediates the relationship between OI traits at each component level and digital service quality.FindingsOccupational stress mediates the relationship between OI traits at the third-order component level and digital service quality. At the second-order component level, only the employee-oriented OI traits exhibit a significant indirect effect on the digital government service quality. Narrowing down to the first order component level, two OI traits, namely "Alignment and Congruence", and "Heart" demonstrate significant indirect effects in the mediation analysis.Originality/valueBy incorporating the organisational model of stress (OMS) with public service-dominant logic (PSDL), this paper takes an approach to revitalise the stressors and individual-level performance used in a traditional work setting. Precisely, it examines how digital service quality is influenced by today's high-performing public organisation stressors (OI traits) along with non-technical element (occupational stress). More importantly, digital government service quality was examined from a less emphasised perspective, namely the supply side or service providers' standpoint in sustaining the digital government service performance.