Bridging the Strategy–Execution Gap in Digital Process Transformation: An Organizational Development Process Model from a Chinese Brewery Case

This study explains how strategy–execution gaps become self-reinforcing during digital process transformation in layered manufacturing organizations. Drawing on an embedded qualitative process study of a large Chinese brewery’s transformation (2020–2024), we triangulate 10 semi-structured interviews across hierarchical levels with longitudinal public disclosures to reconstruct the initiative timeline and trace mechanisms across change phases. The analysis shows that platform-based process governance can scale faster than shared meaning and dialog, producing frontline sensemaking gaps and formalistic, top-down communication. These conditions thin employee voice and weaken feedback closure, which in turn erodes the legitimacy of organizational diagnosis and fragments implementation support. As interface problems are handled through local workarounds, management intensifies visibility-based monitoring, further suppressing voice and reinforcing the execution gap. We develop an organizational development process model that centers feedback closure and diagnosis legitimacy as bridging mechanisms linking soft change dynamics (meaning, trust, voice) with hard digital governance (process standards, data infrastructures, monitoring). The model offers actionable implications for leaders to build closure and legitimate diagnosis as operational capabilities throughout transformation.