Mental Health in The Digital Workplace: Examining the Impact of Wellness-Driven Leadership and Work–Life Balance in Remote Service Organizations

Abstract

Mental health among employees is now a hot organizational issue in work places that are digitalized through the mediation of digitally facilitated projects that place heavy workload pressure and constant connectivity on workers, adding to their psychological load. Based on the Self-Determination Theory and the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, this research project examines how wellness-based leadership and work-life balance can affect the mental health of employees in the Pakistan medical billing business. A cross-sectional survey was a quantitative survey method done on 286 employees occupying remote and technology-intensive service jobs. The reliability analysis, correlation analysis, and multiple regression techniques were used to analyze the data. The results show that wellness-based leadership is a major predictor of well-being among the employees (β = 0.31, p < 0.001), which means that positive and health-related managerial conduct can cause enhanced psychological activity. Mental health was even more affected by work-life balance ( 0.47, p < 0.001) indicating that the capacity of the employees to ensure that their work and personal life do not interfere is a leading factor of well-being. Also, wellness-based leadership had a great impact on the work-life balance of employees ( = 0.42, p < 0.001). The joint regression model successfully explained the mental health of the employees (R 2 = 0.52), which is significant in explaining this phenomenon. The paper adds to the literature on leadership and occupational health by bringing together leadership behavior and leadership management in one concept and providing an empirical data based on a non-western and high power-distance work environment. These findings demonstrate that employee mental health working remotely in the service setting is influenced by job demands as well as managerial practices and recovery options. In practice, the results indicate that the organizations can improve employee welfare by encouraging wellness-based leadership and adopting policies that can help organizations maintain work-life boundaries.