The fragmentation of resources, ecological imbalance, and the disintegration of essential factors in modern urban–rural development have become core bottlenecks constraining the achievement of global sustainable development goals. Existing research often focuses on static analysis or single-dimensional exploration, making it difficult to fully reveal the evolutionary patterns of urban–rural sustainable development systems and the core mechanisms of digital empowerment. This study adopts ecological wisdom as a theoretical perspective, introduces system dynamics methods, and constructs a three-dimensional linkage system simulation model of digital technology, factor circulation, and ecological wisdom capital. Based on model simulation data, a 70-year long-cycle simulation is conducted to explore the leverage effect of digital technology and the self-organizing evolutionary mechanisms of the system. The findings are as follows: First, the transformation of urban–rural sustainable development from fragmentation to synergy is essentially a self-organizing phase transition process. Within the system, digital technology, factor circulation, and ecological wisdom capital form a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship through positive feedback mechanisms, driving the system toward higher-order evolution. Second, key variables such as community participation, urban–rural ecological resilience, and development pressure exhibit significant threshold effects. Only when the investment scale and institutional guarantees for these variables reach critical values can the system’s path dependence be broken, significantly driving synergistic transformation. Third, as an exogenous lever, digital technology can break down barriers to factor segmentation, reduce energy loss during system transformation, and achieve systematic integration of urban–rural resources, public services, and ecological capital with lightweight investment, serving as the core breakthrough for promoting synergistic transformation. This study integrates ecological wisdom and digital technology into the system dynamics analysis framework of urban–rural synergistic transformation, clarifies the dynamic transmission pathways of digital technology empowering urban–rural synergy, overcomes the limitations of traditional static research, enriches the cross-disciplinary application of ecological wisdom and system dynamics in the field of urban–rural development, and provides a scientific policy basis for the mutual construction of the digital economy, ecological protection, and urban–rural integration.

Empowering leadership can provide more resource support for organizations and better match the characteristics of current knowledge employees, such as a high demand for autonomy and pursuit of value diversification. However, existing literature has not fully clarified the specific cognitive transmission mechanisms linking empowering leadership to knowledge workers’ job crafting, nor has it sufficiently examined the boundary conditions of this relationship under specific individual traits. This study aimed to explore the impact of empowering leadership on knowledge employees’ job crafting by constructing a moderated mediation model. This study introduces role breadth self-efficacy as a mediating variable and learning goal orientation as a moderating variable and collects questionnaire data to investigate the underlying mechanisms among 338 knowledge employees. Empowering leadership has a positive effect on knowledge employees’ job crafting. Role breadth self-efficacy mediates the relationship between empowering leadership and job crafting. Learning goal orientation positively moderated the impact of empowering leadership on role breadth self-efficacy. Building an empowering leadership model with empowerment and psychological safety at its core can stimulate employees’ job crafting. Role breadth self-efficacy can be improved by challenging tasks and systematic training. The implementation of differentiated management based on learning-goal orientation strengthens the empowerment effect. These measures provide feasible paths for organizations to drive adaptive changes.

Employees’ helping behavior is critical for team efficiency and innovation. However, the literature highlights competing perspectives on whether receiving help elicits a pattern consistent with reciprocity or defensive ingratitude. Grounded in the help-as-status model and self-regulation theory, we developed a dual-pathway model to examine how received task-related help may influence recipients’ subsequent differentiated helping behaviors through the lens of status threats. We further investigate the moderating role of a competitive climate in this process. On the basis of a two-wave survey of 252 full-time employees, our findings reveal that receiving task-related help is positively associated with perceived status threat. This threat, in turn, serves as a plausible mediator of the link between receiving help and subsequent dependency-oriented help while exerting a suppressive effect on autonomy-oriented help. Furthermore, a competitive climate appeared to intensify the indirect pathway to dependency-oriented help, though the evidence for moderation of the autonomy-oriented help pathway was mixed. By exploring these defensive psychological mechanisms within a single national organizational context, this study offers a cautious, status-based explanation for managing the complexities of prosocial interactions. While the findings provide nuanced insights into post-help dynamics, we acknowledge the inherent boundaries of our two-wave, self-reported survey design. However, the positive direct association with autonomy-oriented help may be consistent with multiple processes beyond status threat, including unmeasured gratitude, reciprocity norms, learning orientation, or enhanced relational quality.