The New Social Image: How AI Competency and AI Proactivity Influence Self- and Peer-Perceptions in the Workplace
For workplace designers and managers, this paper highlights that optimizing AI for performance alone may harm human workers' sense of ownership and meaning, but the findings are based on a small vignette study and are preliminary.
This study examines how AI competency and proactivity affect human self- and peer-perceptions of work ownership, job meaningfulness, and satisfaction in human-AI teams. Results from a vignette study (n=50) show that low AI competency or proactivity generally improves these perceptions, while high levels can negatively impact ownership and job identity.
Human-AI collaboration is considered the most promising way to incorporate AI in the workplace. What remains unexplored are the experiential consequences of this teaming. More specifically, in a team with AI, how humans perceive themselves (self-perception) and how they are perceived by their coworkers (peer perception) in terms of work ownership and job meaningfulness. In a 2x2x2 vignette study (n=50), participants rated perceptions of ownership, affect, job meaningfulness and satisfaction, and role dynamics across two levels (low/high) of AI proactivity and AI competency as within-subject factors, with point-of-view (self perception/peer perception) as between-subjects. Our results showed that AI with low competency or low proactivity generally improved feelings related to ownership, meaningfulness, satisfaction, and role dynamics, and also increased positive affect while reducing negative affect. However, these effects were often influenced by point-of-view. For instance, low AI proactivity resulted in higher job satisfaction from self-perception rather than peer perception. Based on our findings, we argue that designing AI for the future of work solely around performance metrics may not be adequate. Highly competent and proactive AI-driven systems can have undesirable impacts on perceptions of ownership, job identity, social image and team dynamics, and consequently, job meaningfulness.