Opening the Black Box of AI: The Effect of AI Transparency on employees’ Job Crafting

Job crafting is an important way to promote AI-employee collaboration. As an important technological feature of AI, transparency is a topic worthy of study as to whether and how it can affect employees’ job crafting related to AI. Using scenario-based experiments and field study, based on the appraisal theory of emotions, we investigated the influence mechanism and boundary conditions of AI transparency on employees’ job crafting. We found that, (1) AI transparency has a positive indirect effect on employees’ AI adoption via AI playfulness, and this indirect effect is stronger when employees’ STARA awareness is lower or organizational AI readiness is higher. (2) AI transparency has a negative indirect effect on employees’ withdrawal crafting via AI frustration, and this indirect effect is stronger when employees’ STARA awareness is lower. These findings contribute to the literature on AI-employee collaboration and job crafting, and also provide implications for companies to improve AI transparency when implementing AI.