The Role of AI Anxiety in Employees’ Knowledge Hiding Behaviors (WITHDRAWN)

The collaboration between employees and AI becomes increasingly pervasive in organizations. Recent literature calls for understanding AI as a social actor in human-AI collaboration. While knowledge hiding is an important topic in human collaboration, extant literature only focuses on the knowledge hiding between employees, leaving out the potential new patterns of knowledge hiding behavior when AI involved. Therefore, we aim to find employees’ different behavioral patterns of knowledge hiding toward AI and human. Drawn on the intergroup threat theory, this paper investigates different types of AI anxiety in relation to employees’ knowledge hiding behaviors toward AI and employees. Using a two-stage survey with 154 samples, our preliminary findings indicate that AI job replacement anxiety induces employees’ knowledge hiding behavior toward other employees, and AI consciousness anxiety induces employees’ knowledge hiding behavior toward AI. We also investigate psychological ownership and employee perception of AI anthropomorphism as boundary conditions of AI job replacement anxiety and AI consciousness anxiety, respectively. We plan to further collect more than 250 survey samples to enhance our methodological rigor.