Employee Attitudes Towards Digital Teammates: Threats to or Enhancements of Their Job Identity?

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled conversational agents (CAs) increasingly transform online customer service by acting as frontline workers. Understanding employee attitudes toward these digital colleagues is crucial, as CAs blur the boundaries between human and machine roles. However, existing research often views CAs merely as tools rather than digital employees, neglecting their impact on employee psychological drivers, such as job identity. Moreover, there is a lack of studies that have theoretically investigated the paradoxical impact of CAs on employee job identity from both the "bright" (enhancement) and "dark" (threat) perspectives. Grounded in cooperation-competition theory and job demand-control theory, this research uses two studies (study 1 and study 2) to explore how CAs may enhance and/or threaten employee job identity differently. Study 1 introduces the perceptions of CAs as digital employees and develops a Job Identity Enhancement model to examine how human employee job identity is influenced by their experience working with intelligent CAs. Empirical validation through a survey of frontline service workers reveals that employee perceptions of CA autonomy and learning capabilities enhance their job variety and job control, ultimately boosting their job identity and organizational commitment. Study 2 develops a Job Identity Impact model to investigate the paradoxical impact of ChatGPT on employee job identity. Specifically, ChatGPT's reasoning and emotional capability affect job identity differently through job automation and augmentation. Additionally, employee self-efficacy in utilizing ChatGPT plays a critical role in shaping the impact direction on their job identity.