How organizational AI adoption profits top leaders’ self-concept and behavior

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly prevalent in organizations, yet the impact of organizational AI adoption on leaders' self-perception and behavior remains unclear. Drawing on self-expansion theory, our study examines how organizational AI adoption influences top leaders' self-concept and behavior. Two studies were conducted to test our hypotheses. In Study 1, we semi-structurally interviewed 12 top leaders. By integrating manually coded themes and topics extracted via machine learning, we found that AI expands leaders' self-concept and facilitates task execution and role fulfillment. In Study 2, we surveyed 65 top leaders across three waves. Analyses via a moderated mediation model demonstrated that AI adoption boosts leaders' managerial self-efficacy (MSE) by integrating AI's capabilities into their self-concept, subsequently enhancing goal progress. Leaders' bottom-line mentality (BLM) moderated this effect: the AI adoption-MSE link was stronger with high BLM. Our findings extend self-expansion theory to the realm of AI in the workplace and offer guidance to organizations on how to effectively integrate AI to promote leader development and organizational success.