Digital Transformation and Employee Engagement in Healthcare Organizations: The Role of Digital Capability and Innovation

Purpose: Healthcare organizations are undergoing sustained digital transformation, yet the workforce-level mechanisms through which this transformation translates into employee engagement remain theoretically underdeveloped. This paper develops a conceptual framework explaining how digital transformation shapes employee engagement among healthcare professionals through the dual pathways of perceived digital capability and innovative work behavior. Design/methodology/approach: This is a conceptual paper. Drawing on dynamic capabilities theory, the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, and the componential theory of organizational innovation, the paper synthesizes literature on digital transformation, employee engagement, and innovative work behavior in healthcare settings to propose an integrated model and a set of formal, testable propositions. The paper is positioned as a companion piece to a related framework addressing workplace stress, psychological safety, and well-being in the same healthcare workforce population, together constituting a cohort-based conceptual research pair. Findings: The proposed framework positions perceived digital capability as a job resource that both directly predicts engagement and indirectly predicts it through innovative work behavior, with organizational innovation climate moderating the strength of this relationship. Technostress is identified as a countervailing job demand that can attenuate the otherwise positive digital capability-engagement relationship, reconciling mixed findings in the empirical digital-health literature. Research limitations/implications: As a conceptual contribution, the framework and its propositions have not been empirically tested; the paper proposes a survey-based validation agenda using the same healthcare professional cohort addressed in the companion well-being paper. Practical implications: The framework offers healthcare managers a diagnostic basis for sequencing digital transformation initiatives with workforce capability-building and innovation-climate investment, rather than treating technology rollout and engagement outcomes as independent. Originality/value: The paper contributes a dual-pathway, moderated-mediation framework specific to the healthcare context, integrating digital capability and innovation climate as joint explanatory mechanisms linking digital transformation to engagement, an integration not yet made explicit in the existing healthcare management literature.