The dual impacts of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Awareness (AIRA) on work performance and stress: the moderating role of employee proactivity
David Jiawei Xu, Virginia Meng-Chan Lau · Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research · 2025
This study investigates the dual impact of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Awareness (AIRA) on work performance and stress of tourism and hospitality employees, emphasizing the moderating influence of proactive personality traits. Grounded in AI job replacement theory and Theory of Work Adjustment (TWA), this study employs an exploratory sequential mixed methods approach, integrating qualitative interviews and a survey. The findings indicate that AIRA initiates two separate pathways: one that fosters a positive response, encouraging employees to actively learn and improve their performance, and another that leads to a negative outcome, where perceived job insecurity contributes to heightened work stress. Intriguingly, a proactive personality, while reinforcing the AIRA-active learning connection, also simultaneously intensifies job insecurity upon the technological threats. This investigation provides a comprehensive framework to understand AIRA by merging the concept of person-environment fit from TWA with disruptions brought about by AI, challenging assumptions that proactive traits uniformly mitigate stress.