Rethinking Organizational AI Adoption: An Event-Based Perspective on Employee Responses
Harish Yadav, Rajib Lochan Dhar · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025
The past decade has witnessed a surge in research exploring employees’ experiences during organizational AI adoption, a significant organizational-level change event. However, much of this research has overlooked the event-driven dynamics of change processes, essential for capturing their full impact on employees. During the AI adoption process, employees experience “day-to-day change events” originating at the individual level, as the organizational change process is time-consuming, with significant events unfolding at multiple hierarchical levels at different time stamps. To fill this research gap, we draw upon event system theory (EST) and transactional theory of stress and coping (TTSC) to propose that employees’ cognitive appraisal of organizational-level change exerts top-down effects influencing their anticipation and shaping subjective experiences of subsequent everyday change events. We further assert the importance of the strength and frequency of everyday events in exerting single-level and bottom-up direct effects impacting employees’ psychological contract breach, subsequently shaping their change experiences and resulting in disparate behavioral outcomes. The propositions advanced in this study provide a concrete foundation for further empirical investigation and offer both theoretical and practical implications for academia and industry. This paper concludes by outlining potential future research avenues for further investigation.