Employees usage of ChatGPT at work: A job crafting perspective

About 80% of large companies adopted Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their operation. This implementation has been traditionally introduced by the management from a top-down manner, where the management decided to adopt AI in their business operations, and support their employees to make use of it. However, this phenomenon has been changed, thanks to the recent emergence of generative AI, like ChatGPT.

These innovative AIs are free and can be easily integrated into everyday work tasks, empowering employees to introduce AI at work from a bottom-up manner based on their own initiative. Not only do these AI chatbots help to increase employee efficiency and productivity, but they also have the potential to increase their well-being. Despite these benefits, there is still a lack of systematic understanding of how employees may adopt generative AI at work.

This project aims to investigate how employees are using generative AI, and develop a training program to facilitate proactive use of generative AI to enhance employee well-being and performance at work, while still adhering to company’s boundary (e.g., privacy regulation). This will help companies to acknowledge the active role of employees in introducing AI into the workplace. 

Project objectives

This project has three objectives:

• examine how employees are currently using ChatGPT at work;
• develop an online training to facilitate the successful adoption of ChatGPT;
• identify what organizational and individual factors can facilitate this process. 

Potential impact

• Scientific: Traditionally, AI adoption in the workplace was driven from the top-down, with management making decisions about its implementation and encouraging employees to use it. Consequently, AI research in management focuses on how companies can facilitate employee adoption through a top-down approach. Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, presents new opportunities for employees to take a bottom-up approach to introduce and adopt AI in the workplace, based on their own initiatives. To understand this new phenomenon, this project integrates the job crafting literature into AI management research, which will advance the field by capturing how employees utilize personalized job crafting strategy to adopt generative AI with the aim of improving their well-being and performance. Additionally, by applying the job crafting concept to the generative AI adoption context, job crafting research will be advanced by situating it within a specific context.
• Societal: While employees may proactively engage in using Generative AI at work without the involvement of their companies, training can support this behavior. This project aims to develop training that helps employees adapt to ChatGPT in a way that can potentially enhance their performance, and well-being, while simultaneously benefiting the company. 

Duration

The project will run for two years starting from July 2023 onwards.

Multidisciplinary project team

Lead applicant Dr. Christine Fong, Assistant Professor at the Department of Human Resource Studies, and Prof. dr. Dorien Kooij, Full Professor at the Department of Human Resource Studies, will leverage their research interest in job crafting to develop a training program for employees to adopt generative AI tools. Job crafting involves employees changing their job to better align with their interests and abilities, and this theory will help create a personalized training program that can suit the diverse needs of employees.

Dr. Plato Leung, Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS) brings a unique set of skills to the project. His research expertise lies in the intersection of psychology, entrepreneurship, and digitalization, allowing him to apply psychological theories with data science methods to understand emerging phenomena in entrepreneurship. He will be responsible for the initial training, which will introduce employees to the benefits of ChatGPT and how it can assist them in their job tasks. He will provide relevant examples to help employees understand the practical applications of ChatGPT at work.

By combining the expertise of both Christine and Dorien in job crafting theory and Plato’s technical skills, this project can offer a comprehensive training program that not only teaches employees how to use ChatGPT, but also empowers them to personalize their own strategies for adopting the tool at work.

As a collaborative partner, European energy company Vattenfall, will actively participate in developing and evaluating the training. This collaboration will allow for the identification of any potential gaps or issues that may arise during the implementation of the training. The company can also provide feedback on the training materials and delivery methods, which can be used to improve future iterations of the training program.

This project is funded by Tilburg University’s Digital Sciences for Society program: