When the “Human Touch” Backfires: The Ethical Impact of AI Anthropomorphism in the Workplace

Abstract

As technology advances rapidly, artificial intelligence (AI) in workplaces is being endowed with increasingly higher levels of anthropomorphism. Despite scholars generally viewing AI anthropomorphism as a panacea for promoting the effectiveness of AI applications and employee-AI collaboration, this research highlights that it can incur potential costs for workplace ethics. Integrating the ontology of AI and the moral relativism literature, we suggest that AI anthropomorphism induces employees’ moral relativism, which subsequently promotes their counterproductive work behavior, unethical pro-organizational behavior, and unethical tolerance toward other organizational members. An experiment and two multi-wave survey studies across different countries (i.e., China and the U.S.) and different types of AI (i.e., robots and large language models) provide substantial support for our hypotheses. Our research offers important insights into both the ethical consequences and the dark side of AI anthropomorphism, and provides significant extensions to the workplace behavioral ethics literature.

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