Lending a Hand via AI: Generative AI-Facilitated Helping, Moral Impostorism, and Ethical Passivity

Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly proliferating in the modern workplace. Beyond completing in-role work tasks, employees also increasingly use these tools to engage in extra-role helping behaviors toward others—a phenomenon we term GenAI-facilitated helping. Although this approach substantially reduces the personal costs of helping while promoting the benefits to recipients, we propose that it may carry unintended ethical costs for the helpers themselves. Drawing on the theory of the moralization of effort, we propose that GenAI-facilitated helping triggers moral impostorism—a psychological state in which employees believe they are not as moral as they appear to be—which in turn promotes their ethical passivity, manifesting as ethical silence and unethical tolerance. Furthermore, this effect is amplified among employees high in conscientiousness. Results from two preregistered experiments and one multi-wave longitudinal survey support our theoretical model. This research advances the integration of the AI and helping behavior literatures, extends impostor phenomenon research into the moral domain, and contributes to our understanding of the ethical consequences of workplace AI use and the dark side of conscientiousness.