When resilience backfires: the counterintuitive effect of employee resilience in high-tech surveillance environments

The fast adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in workplaces is a serious paradox: optimization tools can negatively affect the mental health of employees. The research paper examines the two psychological mechanisms that connect AI exposure with wellbeing among managers in the manufacturing industry in China. Based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework, we discuss how AI-based surveillance and AI-awareness have different effects on psychological wellbeing mediated by the parallel mediators of perceived autonomy and psychological distress, and how the relationships are moderated by employee resilience. The structural equation modeling was performed on data of a three-wave time-lagged survey of 482 managers. Findings affirm that surveillance negatively impacts psychological wellbeing by lowering autonomy and enhancing distress, and awareness does so through the same mechanisms. As opposed to the buffering hypothesis, resilience increased the positive relationship between surveillance and distress, and undermined the protective role of awareness on distress. These results indicate that resilience is a two-sided sword in high-control AI settings, i.e., the issue of its consistent value, as well as the necessity of context-specific application of AI and support systems.