When AI Acts as an Enabler: Towards a Teleological Job Crafting for Managers in AI Contexts

Job crafting has been claimed to be an important way in which employees respond to the implementation of new technologies. As it creates the conditions for lower-level employees’ job crafting, managers’ job crafting is likely to be especially important for a successful implementation. Yet, we know very little about managers’ job crafting and nothing about this job crafting in the context of Artificial Intelligence. Studying qualitatively managers’ job crafting linked to the implementation of AI, our interviews revealed that the implementation of AI enables managers to engage in a teleological job crafting whereby managers reimagine their job to express their latent sense of self and vision of human relations and society. Contrary to the idea in the literature that managers’ job crafting is inwardly focused, the managers’ job crafting we uncovered is deeply relational with at its core the mission to “bring people together” as a positive response to the fear that employees will self-exclude and self-marginalize in response to AI. To the AI literature, we contribute a view of augmentation that is spontaneously humane rather than focused on employees’ acquisition of new skills.