Thriving Through Transformation: Employee Experience, Resilience, and Human Sustainability in Changing Workplaces

Introduction

Contemporary organisations are increasingly operating under conditions of continuous transformation shaped by digital disruption, artificial intelligence (AI), hybrid work arrangements, sustainability transitions, and persistent workforce uncertainty. Unlike earlier planned and episodic approaches to organisational change, transformation today is experienced as ongoing, psychologically demanding, and open-ended, placing sustained pressure on employees, managers, and teams to adapt and remain engaged under conditions of deep uncertainty. At the same time, organisations are expected not only to transform effectively, but also to sustain employee wellbeing, resilience, inclusion, meaningful work, and healthy organisational functioning throughout prolonged change processes. Recent scholarship has generated important insights into organisational transformation, digitalisation, and technological adaptation. However, transformation research continues to privilege structural, strategic, and technological dimensions of change over the lived psychological experiences of employees navigating continuous transformation. Emerging evidence increasingly points to the psychological consequences of ongoing transformation, including burnout, change fatigue, technostress, disengagement, identity disruption, declining trust, and the erosion of meaningful work in digitally intensive environments. Simultaneously, growing attention is being directed towards the conditions that enable employees and organisations to sustain resilience, psychological safety, adaptive capacity, and collective thriving during prolonged uncertainty and change. This special issue seeks to advance more psychologically informed and human-centred understandings of organisational transformation. It aims to foreground employee experience, resilience, wellbeing, inclusion, and human sustainability as central concerns in contemporary transformation research. The issue is particularly interested in how employees psychologically experience, interpret, sustain, resist, and adapt to transformation across diverse organisational contexts, including AI-enabled workplaces, hybrid work environments, sustainability-driven reform, and digitally intensive organisations. The special issue is also timely given the increasing societal and organisational importance of creating psychologically sustainable workplaces capable of supporting both organisational adaptation and employee wellbeing. In this regard, the issue aligns closely with contemporary debates surrounding healthy work environments, meaningful work, psychosocial safety, inclusion, and sustainable organisational development.

Associated with the British Academy of Management 2026 Annual Conference and its 40th anniversary theme, “Thriving Together: Impact, Innovation, and Inclusion in Business and Management,” this special issue aims to contribute toward a forward-looking research agenda for understanding the psychological dynamics of organisational transformation in increasingly uncertain and rapidly changing workplaces.

List of Topic Areas

• Employee resilience, wellbeing, and psychological adaptation during organisational transformation
• Change fatigue, burnout, technostress, and employee engagement in digitally intensive workplaces
• Human experiences of AI-enabled work and algorithmically mediated organisational environments
• Meaningful work, psychological safety, trust, and identity during continuous transformation
• Inclusion, diversity, belonging, and human sustainability in changing workplaces
• Leadership, resilience, and psychologically sustainable approaches to organisational transformation
• Hybrid work, digital transformation, and the future of employee experience
• Future-oriented theoretical and empirical perspectives on continuous organisational transformation

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jomp

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jmp

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key Deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 30/09/2026

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 30/11/2026