ArticleFrontiers in psychology2026
Digital governance pressure and digital burnout among grassroots public sector employees: the mediating roles of cognitive load and negative affect.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Digital technologies are reshaping public governance. Although they can improve administrative efficiency, service delivery, and governance capacity, they may also create occupational health risks for public sector employees. Existing research on digital burnout has largely focused on general technology-use settings, with limited attention to its formation in the public sector, especially among grassroots public sector employees. Drawing on the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model and cognitive-affective theory, we examine how digital governance pressure is associated with digital burnout in rural digital governance in China. It develops a pressure stimulus-organism processing-burnout response framework to analyze the roles of technology-related, regulation-related, and context-related pressures and the mediating mechanisms of cognitive load and negative affect. Based on survey data from 535 grassroots public sector employees, the study applies partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and necessary condition analysis (NCA) to examine both sufficient pathways and necessary-condition patterns. The PLS-SEM results show that technology-related pressures are associated with digital burnout through cognitive load and through the sequential pathway from cognitive load to negative affect. By contrast, regulation-related and context-related pressures are mainly associated with digital burnout through negative affect. The NCA results further suggest that, at high levels of digital burnout, the three forms of digital governance pressure, cognitive load, and negative affect exhibit threshold-like patterns, with cognitive load and negative affect showing relatively higher bottleneck values. These findings extend research on the unintended consequences of digital governance and provide empirical grounding for reducing digital burdens and protecting occupational health among grassroots public sector employees.
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