How Digital Transformation Shapes Unequal Employee Experiences: An Interpretive Case Study of a Chinese State-Owned Enterprise

Digital transformation (DT) is widely recognised as a systemic organisational change, yet research reports sharply divergent employee experiences and offers a limited explanation of how and why these differences emerge over time. This gap persists because employee experience is often treated as a static outcome or reduced to individual-level variation, leaving the contextual processes that shape experience underexamined. This study adopts the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) framework as a sensitising lens to understand how DT reshapes work conditions and employee experience as an unfolding process.
The study draws on an interpretive single-case study of a large Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) undergoing a six-year DT initiative. In this case, two connected processes emerged. First, DT was experienced as producing differentiated working conditions through hierarchical position and organisational roles, with demands and resources distributed unevenly at the team level. Second, employees interpret and reclassify these changed team-level conditions into individual experiences over time through iterative meaning-making shaped by positional cues, institutional norms, and contextual change.
The case suggests that DT shapes work conditions at the collective level, and channels them unevenly to individuals, and that whether these conditions function as demands or resources is produced through ongoing interpretation. It contributes to JD-R theory by reconceptualising demands and resources as context-dependent meaning categories, and illustrates how interpretive case research can help explain structural and institutional dynamics that are less visible in scale-based approaches.