There's no Playbook for This: Exploring Employee Experiences and Emotions During Digital Transformation
Open AccessOnly 44% of executives are adequately preparing their organizations for the digital transformation (DT) they know their industries are facing (Kane et al., 2016). However, the global pandemic of COVID-19 changed consideration of and readiness for DT, accelerating and reprioritizing plans and strategies in a matter of weeks. Individual nonmanagerial employees are the ultimate implementers of change (Armenakis & Harris, 2009; George & Jones, 2001; Porras & Robertson, 1992); yet many organizational scholars and practitioners have focused their research lens on the change agent or the transformation leader, rather than nonmanagerial individual employees (Armenakis & Harris, 2009). Understanding nonmanagerial employees’ firsthand experiences and resulting emotions during organizational transformation, and more specifically DT, provides organizational leaders and change agents with insight to design and implement change proactively, taking employee needs into account. The research questions were as follows: How do nonmanagerial employees within organizations undergoing DT describe their experiences? How are they affected by these experiences? This basic qualitative study used Affective Events Theory (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996) as the theoretical framework and phenomenological building approach of two interviews based on Seidman (2006, 2019). The purposeful selection of 13 participants in a variety of ages, roles, and industries created “information-rich cases” (Patton, 2009, p. 230) with over 50 emotions experienced. Findings included the combination of both a DT and the COVID-19 pandemic magnified the experienced organizational issues, like paradoxes, leadership weaknesses, and communication gaps, illuminating an impact on the participants. Additionally, how the nonmanagerial employees experienced the DT was affected by their ability to recognize their emotions and how they managed them. Finally, the affective responses of the participants demonstrated grief and loss—from frustrations at indecisive leaders, to worry about work-life balance, to annoyance at paradoxical processes. Even indifference or feeling like an observer can be part of the compounded loss and grieving that comes from organizational transformation during a global pandemic. The tremendous grief experienced by the participants is a microcosm of the loss and grief that occurred throughout the world during the pandemic.
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