To embrace or to avoid: the dual path effects of digital technology requirements on employees with different digital literacy

Whether and how enterprise digital technology requirements affect employees constitutes a pivotal scholarly inquiry in the digital economy landscape. Grounded in the Cognitive Appraisal Theory of Stress and integrating the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) Model with the Conservation of Resources (CoR) Theory, this study proposes employees may appraise enterprise digital technology requirements as either challenge stressors-proactively embracing demands to catalyze positive outcomes in proactive behaviors-or hindrance stressors-cognitively avoiding requirements thus eliciting negative consequences in turnover intention. Moreover, employees' digital literacy levels fundamentally reconfigure their cognitive appraisals of these technological demands, thereby triggering differential behavioral cascades. Utilizing a three-wave longitudinal survey design with 332 validated responses from employees undergoing digital transformation, this study employed AMOS 23.0 for confirmatory factor analysis, SPSS 23.0 for hierarchical regression modeling, and the PROCESS macro for bootstrap mediation tests to substantiate the proposed theoretical framework. This study advances the dual-path framework of enterprise digital technology implementation by elucidating how digital literacy-as a personal resource-shapes divergent outcomes stemming from organizational digital demands. Furthermore, it extends the application of the Cognitive Appraisal Theory of Stress to digital contexts through empirical validation, and also to provide some inspiration and reference for relevant management practices.