When resilience backfires: the counterintuitive effect of employee resilience in high-tech surveillance environments

TL;DR

This paper explores how employee resilience can have unexpected negative effects in workplaces with high AI surveillance.

Contribution

It reveals that resilience can backfire by increasing distress in high-tech surveillance environments.

Findings

AI-based surveillance lowers psychological wellbeing by reducing autonomy and increasing distress.

Employee resilience amplifies the negative relationship between surveillance and distress.

Resilience undermines the protective effect of AI-awareness on distress.

Abstract

The fast adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in workplaces is a serious paradox: optimization tools can negatively affect the mental health of employees. The research paper examines the two psychological mechanisms that connect AI exposure with wellbeing among managers in the manufacturing industry in China. Based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework, we discuss how AI-based surveillance and AI-awareness have different effects on psychological wellbeing mediated by the parallel mediators of perceived autonomy and psychological distress, and how the relationships are moderated by employee resilience. The structural equation modeling was performed on data of a three-wave time-lagged survey of 482 managers. Findings affirm that surveillance negatively impacts psychological wellbeing by lowering autonomy and enhancing distress, and awareness does so through the same mechanisms. As opposed to the buffering hypothesis, resilience increased the positive relationship between surveillance and distress, and undermined the protective role of awareness on distress. These results indicate that resilience is a two-sided sword in high-control AI settings, i.e., the issue of its consistent value, as well as the necessity of context-specific application of AI and support systems.

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