Fairness in the age of AI: How digital HR climate and commitment drive sustainable employee retention

BackgroundDigital transformation has revolutionized HRM practices, thus making organizational justice and employees' perceptions of fairness in digital HRM systems more important than ever before. Nevertheless, little empirical research exists in terms of investigating the mechanisms where organizational justice contributes to sustainable employee retention through the concept of Digital HR Climate and organizational commitment with its multidimensional nature.ObjectiveIn the present paper, we empirically examine the influence of procedural, distributive, and interactional organizational justice on sustainable employee retention through the sequential mediation of Digital HR Climate and different dimensions of organizational commitment: affective, continuance, and normative. We also explore whether AI fairness can serve as a moderator for the effect of Digital HR Climate on organizational commitment.MethodsCross-sectional data from 412 Pakistani hospitality employees were collected and analyzed with PLS-SEM methodology to test the direct and sequential mediation hypotheses, as well as moderation effect.ResultsOur analysis shows that organizational justice positively influences Digital HR Climate, which has a significant impact on three forms of organizational commitment (affective, continuance, and normative), each of which, in turn, predicts sustainable employee retention. AI fairness is found to significantly strengthen the effect of Digital HR Climate on affective and normative commitments, whereas no significant moderation effect has been found on continuance commitment.ConclusionsThe study extends Social Exchange Theory by examining the influence of organizational justice, Digital HR Climate, and organizational commitment (as mediated variables) as well as the moderating role of AI fairness in one explanatory model.