This study examines how anthropomorphic cues that make AI agency socially salient influence employee work engagement in mandatory, performance-oriented human–AI collaboration. It distinguishes AI agency from AI anthropomorphism, tests affective and evaluative motivational mechanisms and identifies perceived AI threat as a boundary condition grounded in the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model.
Across two pilot studies and two main experiments (total N = 501), we used immersive workplace role-playing scenarios to test a dual-pathway model. Integrating social response theory with the JD-R model, this research tests a dual-pathway model in which anthropomorphic design influences work engagement through emotional bonding and acquisitive impression management motive (IMM), whereas perceived artificial intelligence threat operates as a hindrance demand that weakens these resource pathways.
Anthropomorphic AI enhanced work engagement through two motivational routes: an affective route via emotional bonding and an evaluative route via IMM. However, perceived AI threat significantly attenuated these benefits. When threat was high, the positive effects of anthropomorphism on emotional bonding, IMM and work engagement became non-significant, suggesting that replacement-related threat drains the psychological capacity needed for anthropomorphic cues to function as job resources.
This research contributes to workplace AI and information systems (IS) scholarship by clarifying how anthropomorphic cues make AI agency socially salient without equating anthropomorphism with agency. It extends prior work on anthropomorphic AI and engagement by identifying an evaluative pathway – performing for AI – alongside the affective pathway of bonding with AI. It also offers a contingency-based explanation for the anthropomorphism paradox by showing that the benefits of humanlike design depend on the surrounding AI-threat climate.
