How human-machine collaboration fuels employees' digital creativity: the serial mediating roles of technology...

Against the backdrop of AI-driven digital transformation, digital creativity has emerged as a critical driver of corporate innovation. Consequently, investigating the mechanisms through which human-machine collaboration influences employees' digital creativity holds profound theoretical and practical significance. Grounded in the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory, this study constructs a structural equation model to explore these underlying pathways, specifically examining the chain-mediating roles of technology acceptance and positive emotion. Using cross-sectional multi-source survey data from 401 employees, empirical findings reveal that human-machine collaborative behavior shows a significant positive association with employee digital creativity. Furthermore, technology acceptance serves as a primary cognitive channel, playing a crucial mediating role in this relationship. Collaboration with AI also indirectly fosters digital creativity by cultivating positive emotions, which supply the psychological momentum necessary for creative endeavors. Notably, the results confirm a serial mediation pathway, establishing the sequential pattern: "human-machine collaboration → technology acceptance → positive emotions → employees' digital creativity." Ultimately, this study expands the scope of the JD-R theory by enriching its conceptualization of job resources in the digital era, while simultaneously offering multidimensional practical insights for leveraging human-machine collaboration to empower workforce creativity during enterprise intelligent transformation.