Confronting and alleviating AI resistance in the workplace: An integrative review and a process framework

Abstract

This study involves an integrative literature review and a process framework explaining the mechanisms to confront and alleviate employee Artificial intelligence (AI) resistance in organizations. First, we conceptualize AI resistance as a three-dimensional concept embodied in employees' fears, inefficacies, and antipathies toward AI. We advance that experiencing mistrust, existential questioning, and technological reflection are key individual mechanisms to confronting AI resistance connected to organizational mechanisms to alleviate AI resistance through the continuous interaction and unfolding of anxiety and introspection. We also explain the alleviation of AI resistance as an organizational process consisting of AI accessibility, human-AI augmentation, and AI-technology legitimation, each of which maps into one of the dimensions in the employee-level confrontation mechanisms. Overall, our conceptual framework provides an overarching and granular understanding of AI resistance, how employees confront it, and how it can be alleviated in the workplace.