Story by Nick Houtman “Our own identities sort of color our workday and the things that we end up doing,” Leavitt said. Leavitt has also looked at the impact of AI on performance evaluation and employee trust. Assuming that AI tools work as advertised, Leavitt wonders about the implications of fully relying on AI processes. “There are situations under which predictive accuracy isn’t the only logic that we should care about,” he said. As businesses adopt chatbots and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools, employees may be changing their interactions with coworkers. For Keith Leavitt, the Scott and Loni Parrish Chair in Business and professor of management, this trend raises questions about workplace relationships. Does the use of AI lead to stronger teams and help employees work together? Or not? In an ongoing project, Leavitt and his colleagues have tentatively found that the answer depends in part on how much employee s depend on AI. And the potential take-home message for managers might be that fostering productive employee teams may depend on controlling AI access. Leavitt specializes in organizational behavior and teaches courses in management and ethics. He has studied the intersection of employees’ personal and professional lives and the effect of social judgments on workplace ethics. AI may change workplace relationships ‘My chatbot can answer that. Who needs a team?’ “We see a kind of crossover. The more you use the tool, it pushes you away from quid pro quo of reciprocal exchange, but it pushes you either to be more generous or to be sort of more miserly in your social exchanges with other people.” To study the impact of AI on employee relationships, Leavitt and his team (including Feng Qiu ’15, who received his MBA at OSU) have focused on new employees in a hotel which had provided some of the workers with access to a design chatbot but withheld it from others. High dependence on the chatbot led to what Leavitt calls “exchange weariness.” That means employees who used the chatbot felt that they had little to offer others and, instead of engaging 12 | College of Business
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