Digital transformation has brought advanced technologies to the forefront of organizations, reshaping how workers engage with tasks, colleagues, and organizational processes. While technologies offer greater efficiency and innovation, they also raise important questions about their effect on worker's well-being, motivation and performance. In response, the Industry 5.0 paradigm positions human-centricity as a guiding principle to ensure technologies support, rather than constrain, human potential (European Commission, 2021). Despite its growing relevance for creating thriving workplaces, the concept of human-centric technology remains ambiguous (Padovano et al., 2024) and lacks clear conceptual boundaries with related concepts, such as psychological empowerment (Spreitzer, 1995). The lack of a consistent conceptualization (European Commission, 2024; Hermawati et al., 2024) poses a challenge for both theory and practice, as it complicates efforts to assess how human-centric technology shapes worker’s well-being, motivation, and performance.

To address this gap, this study investigates: To what extent is human-centricity on technology perceived as distinct from related concepts by experts? The Job Demands – Resources (JD-R) model (Bakker et al., 2004; Bakker & Demerouti, 2017) is a well-suited guiding framework for this study as it provides a flexible, integrative approach to systematically evaluating whether human-centricity constitutes a distinct combination of job demands and resources or overlaps with existing work design constructs. It is a widely used framework in organizational psychology to explain how job demands and resources influence worker’s well-being, motivation and performance. From this perspective, technologies are not inherently beneficial or harmful (Scholze & Hecker, 2023), their impact depends on whether they function as resources supporting well-being, or as demands constraining human agency and intensify work.

Data were collected through 24 semi-structured expert interviews with interdisciplinary scholars, practitioners, and policymakers specialising and working in Industry 5.0 related fields. The interviews explored how human-centricity is interpreted and operationalized within the Industry 5.0 context. Analyzed through the JD-R model, findings suggest that human-centricity of technology does not introduce entirely new job characteristics but rather reflects a specific configuration of existing job demands and resources that are shaped by advanced technologies.

This study makes three contributions by synthesizing insights from academic literature and expert interviews, guided by the JD-R model: 1) conceptually clarifying human-centricity of technology, 2) situating human-centricity of technology in relation to the JD-R model informed understanding, and 3) establishing a theoretically coherent foundation for future empirical research on human-centricity, including scale development.