Employee-Generative AI Collaboration and Workforce Agility: The Mediating Role of Creative Self-Efficacy

Abstract

With the increased adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in various industries, employee interaction with AI is significantly influencing how employees tackle problems and generate ideas for work in modern-day organizations. With such dynamic environments, workforce agility is a key factor in modern-day organizations, as they increasingly require employees who can act in proactive, adaptive, and resilient manner. Although interest in employee interaction with AI is on the rise, very little research has attempted to explore whether employee collaboration with GenAI helps in improving workforce agility and its underlying psychological mechanisms. With this aim in view, this study attempts to explore whether employee-GenAI collaboration helps in improving workforce agility and whether creative self-efficacy plays a mediating role in this relationship. Based on Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 2001), this study is based on the premise that employee-GenAI collaboration helps in improving workforce agility through its impact on creative self-efficacy. The study is based on a survey of 251 employees from IT industry in Delhi NCR. Workforce agility is based on its three components: proactivity, adaptivity and resilience. Established scales have been used for measuring employee-GenAI collaboration and creative self-efficacy. The results of this study highlight that employee-GenAI collaboration is positively associated with workforce agility, both directly and indirectly through creative self-efficacy. The study is important as it establishes workforce agility as an important outcome of employee-GenAI collaboration.