360
This study was conducted in collaboration with the Work and Organisational Research Centre at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania.
360 participants completed a structured survey drawing on validated scales from organisational and occupational health psychology.
It aimed to understand why some people experience AI as an opportunity and others as a threat, and consider what organisations can do about it. But it throws a light on other aspects of our relationship to technology.
Trust is easily lost but hard to recover
The great danger is in the ‘sociopathic perception’. When an employee comes to see an AI system as acting against human interests, trust suffers. That’s true even among people whose jobs require them to use the technology.
It’s one thing to be consulted quite another to be obsoleted
Organisations that deploy AI without addressing the potential for negative perceptions are creating a problem they won’t see coming, and there’ll be a battle once it has already taken hold.
Welcome to the age of ‘Technostress’
In common with other transforming technologies, AI causes adaptation pressures. When people can’t keep up with the changes wrought by technology in the workplace, their troubles are compounded.
Good people lose their investment in themselves
The data showed that stress actively cancels out the advantages that education and experience would otherwise provide.
A highly educated, experienced employee under technostress loses the career advantage their background would normally give them
And companies
are worse off too
This is a point that doesn’t get the attention it deserves, and is especially relevant to strategic planning.
It means the people organisations most rely on to lead the business through change are often the ones quietly absorbing the cost of it.
It’s a cost neither they nor the business should bear.
The study found that the difference between those who see AI as a threat or an opportunity is not fixed. It’s not about age, or education, or role. But it depends on two conditions: whether people trust the AI they’re working with, and whether they feel able to keep up with it.
What are you gonna do?
When both conditions are present, people learn more, experience less stress, and are more likely to see AI as a career opportunity.
When they’re absent, the opposite is true and things go from bad to worse.