The Impact of Employees’ Perceived Usefulness of AI on Creativity and Task Performance

Employees’ interaction with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) is not merely a passive acceptance process but also an active, bottom-up initiative to embrace change. Current research lack exploration from the employee perspective on how individual perceptions of AI impact behaviors and outcomes. Through empirical analysis of 231 samples, we construct a moderated mediation model to investigate the effect of employees’ perceived usefulness of AI on skill crafting behaviors, and in turn, on creativity and task performance. The findings reveal that perceived AI usefulness positively influences skill crafting. Skill crafting fully mediates the relationship between perceived AI usefulness and both employee creativity and task performance. Furthermore, transformational leadership positively moderates these direct effects and the indirect effect of perceived AI usefulness on creativity. These results extend the job crafting theory and offer suggestions for organizational management practice.