Reducing the adverse effects of compulsory citizenship behaviour on employee innovative behaviour via AI usage in China

ABSTRACT

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a crucial role in the workplace by freeing up the hands and brains of employees. According to affective events theory (AET), this research assumes that AI can mitigate the negative effects of compulsory citizenship behaviour (CCB). From a mixed-method study involving both a survey (targeting 246 Chinese employees) and interviews (with a further 20 employees from China), results indicate that CCB can increase employees’ anger and hostility and ultimately negatively affect employees’ innovative behaviour. However, AI usage is shown to have the capacity to mitigate such adverse effects. This research offers both theoretical and practical insights for CCB research.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• Affective events theory
• AI usage
• anger
• CCB
• employees’ innovative behaviour
• hostility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province [YQ2021G004]; the National Natural Science Foundation of China [72131005, 71972062], and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in Harbin Institute of Technology.

Notes on contributors

Wen-Yan Duan

Wen-Yan Duan is with the School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China. Her research interests include Chinese organizational behaviour, emotion, and stress.

Tung-Ju Wu

Tung-Ju Wu is with the School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China. His research interests include organization research on human–AI collaboration, job emotion, quality of work-life and management psychology.

An-Pin Wei

An-Pin Wei is with the Department of Business Management, National Taichung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. His specialization is corporate management, behavioural finance, marketing finance, and portfolio management.

Yu-Ting Huang

Yu-Ting Huang is with the Bachelor Programme of International Management, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. Her specialization is internal marketing, brand equity, service marketing, HRM and cross-cultural study.