The Influence of Remote Working on Job Performance among Faculty Members in Public Universities in China: The Mediating Role of Employee Engagement and the Moderating Role of Transformational Leadership

Remote working has become an important feature of digitally mediated academic work in China’s higher education sector, where increasing work intensity, flexible work arrangements, dependence on digital technologies, and communication challenges may shape faculty members’ engagement and job performance. Although prior research has examined individual aspects of remote working, limited attention has been given to how multiple remote-working conditions jointly influence job performance and the psychological and leadership mechanisms through which these effects occur. Guided by Job Demands–Resources (JD–R) Theory, Work Engagement Theory, and Transformational Leadership Theory, this paper develops an integrated framework linking four dimensions of remote working—work intensity, work flexibility, technological support, and communication quality—to faculty members’ job performance. Work intensity represents a job demand, whereas work flexibility, technological support, and communication quality represent job resources. Employee engagement is proposed as the mediating mechanism through which these remote-working conditions influence job performance, while transformational leadership is proposed as a moderating mechanism that shapes their relationships with employee engagement. The proposed study focuses on full-time faculty members with remote working experience in three public universities in Jinan City, Shandong Province, China. A quantitative cross-sectional survey design is proposed, with purposive sampling, a 44-item questionnaire, and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) for hypothesis testing. This paper contributes to the literature by integrating remote-working demands and resources, employee engagement, and transformational leadership within one theoretical model and by extending remote working research to the underexamined context of Chinese public higher education.