Affiliation or Alienation? Effects of Employee AI Awareness on Relationship with Coworkers

AI awareness refers to employees’ perception of the impact of AI applications on their work. The fourth industrial revolution has arrived, and while AI enhances employee performance, it also brings risks and uncertainties that significantly impact employees. Extant research of AI awareness focuses its effects on employees’ work outcomes and pay insufficient attention to its effects on their interaction with their co-workers. Based on social information processing theory, a scenario-based experiment of 342 participants and a longitudinal study of 330 participants explored the specific impact of employee AI awareness on coworkers and the explanatory mechanism of the effect. The results show that employee AI awareness has a positive indirect effect on co-workers’ helping behaviors through need for affiliation, and the indirect effect is stronger when the degree of AI dependence is high than when the degree of AI dependence is low. However, when AI dependence is low, employee AI awareness has a negative indirect effect on coworkers’ ostracism behaviors via alienation. These findings will promote a more balanced view of the impact of AI utilization and have important implications for both management theory and practice.