Escaping to a Structured World: Opacity of AI, Work Withdrawal, and Interpersonal Objectification

The current study aims to understand how the workplace new “coworker” AI exerts opacity challenges to human employees and its downstream outcomes, as well as how organizations could help alleviate the detrimental effects. Drawing on compensatory control theory and literature on workplace AI, we argue that, when viewing AI as a new “coworker”, AI exhibits opacity to human employees and propose that opacity of AI affects human employees’ perceived lack of control, which in turn impacts task and social structures in a broader organizational context. We also identified the important role of organizational AI socialization practice in mitigating the undesired effects of opacity of AI. We conducted a pre-registered online experiment and two time-lagged survey studies to test our hypothesized model. Results indicated that opacity of AI positively predicted employees’ perceived lack of control, which in turn was positively related to work withdrawal and objectification towards coworkers. Moreover, organizational AI socialization practice mitigated the effects of perceived lack of control on work withdrawal and objectification towards coworkers. We conclude the article with discussions of our theoretical and practical contributions.