The Effect of Psychological Contract, Perceived Organizational Support, And Empowering Leadership on Work Engagement Through Psychological Capital in The Public Sector

Abstract

This study examines the influence of psychological contract, perceived organizational support, and empowering leadership on work engagement through psychological capital as a mediating variable among State Civil Apparatus (ASN) employees at the Ministry of Administrative Reform and Bureaucratic Reform (PANRB), Indonesia. The study was motivated by findings from the Ministry’s 2025 Mental Health and Well-Being Assessment Survey, which indicated psychological vulnerability and suboptimal well-being among First Expert Functional Position employees, raising concerns regarding their level of work engagement. This study employed a quantitative causal research design using purposive sampling to collect data from 178 First Expert Functional Position employees through an online questionnaire. The data were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS 4. The results indicate that psychological contract, perceived organizational support, and empowering leadership each have a positive and significant effect on both work engagement and psychological capital. Furthermore, psychological capital has a positive and significant effect on work engagement and partially mediates the relationship between each of the three exogenous variables and work engagement. These findings demonstrate that fulfilling psychological contracts, strengthening organizational support, and implementing empowering leadership practices can enhance employee engagement both directly and indirectly by developing employees’ psychological capital, including self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience. This study contributes theoretically by integrating these three variables into a single mediation model within the context of Indonesian public sector bureaucracy and provides practical implications for public sector human resource management strategies aimed at strengthening psychological capital and sustaining civil servants’ work engagement.