Digital Leadership and Work–Home Integration: The Mediating Role of Work Engagement

Purpose: This study aims to examine the effect of digital leadership on work-home integration, with work engagement as a mediating variable among employees in the digital creative media industry in Bandar Lampung, Indonesia.
Research Methodology: This study used a quantitative, survey-based approach. Data were collected through an online questionnaire from 110 employees selected using purposive sampling. Data analysis was performed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with the help of SmartPLS 4.
Results: The results show that digital leadership has a positive and significant effect on work engagement and work-home integration. Work engagement also has a significant positive effect on work-home integration. In addition, work engagement significantly mediates the relationship between digital leadership and work-home integration. The model explains 47.4% of the variance in work-home integration and 29.5% in work engagement.
Conclusions: Digital leadership plays an important role in shaping employees’ ability to manage the integration between work and personal life, both directly and indirectly through increased work engagement. Work engagement serves as a key psychological mechanism in enhancing adaptive work-home integration in digital work environments.
Limitations: This study is limited to employees in the digital creative media industry in one region (Bandar Lampung), with a relatively small sample size, which may limit generalizability to other sectors or regions.
Contributions: This study contributes to the literature on digital leadership and work-home integration by introducing work engagement as a mediating mechanism and providing empirical evidence from the digital creative industry in an emerging economy context.