Abstract:

Industry 5.0 represents a value-oriented framework for industrial transformation that emphasizes sustainability, resilience, and human-centricity. Despite the growing interest in this concept, it remains an open question which factors best explain its real-world implementation at the organizational level. The aim of the study is to analyse the relationships between perceived organizational readiness for Industry 5.0, the perceived need for its implementation, and its implementation status. The research was conducted as a quantitative cross-sectional study on a sample of 286 organisations. The results showed that Industry 5.0 implementation is positively related to both perceived readiness and perceived need for its implementation, with readiness emerging as the stronger predictor. On the contrary, the readiness–need gap did not demonstrate a significant relationship to the status of its implementation. The study shows that the implementation of Industry 5.0 principles is better explained by the absolute level of organizational readiness and the perceived need than by their simple difference.