Unrealistic Optimism Regarding Artificial Intelligence Opportunities in Human Resource Management
Open accessAbstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) has many uses in domains like automotive and finance or business divisions like human resource management (HRM). This study presents a survey that was conducted among a German national sample (n = 79) of HRM personnel from small- and medium-sized enterprises regarding the expected impact of AI on their own and other companies. Indications for unrealistic optimism, i.e., assuming negative impacts are more likely for others than oneself, were identified. AI will play an increasingly important role, with cost reductions and efficiency gains serving as the highest motives and a lack of AI specialists representing the highest inhibitor. Participants assume that AI will reduce the number of employees in other companies, while it let the one in their own grow. They expect AI to take over more tasks in other companies and believe AI will more impact other companies' HRM, especially in administrative processing. Future research should include (repeated) investigations into other business divisions.
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Many researchers have called for the development of AI-literacy-assessment instruments of high psychometric quality.
“For this reason, many researchers have called for the development of AI-literacy-assessment instruments of high psychometric quality [15,17,18].”
From Evaluating AI Courses: A Valid and Reliable Instrument for Assessing Artificial-Intelligence Learning through Comparative Self-Assessment (2023) · cites this paper as [18]
In Limitations and Future Research (page unavailable), Weber suggests that future studies explicitly measure AI literacy using an objective scale. That supports the need to assess AI literacy, but the paper does not call for developing a new instrument of high psychometric quality or establish that many researchers have made that call. (LLM, conf=0.76)
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- Authors
- Weber, P.
- Affiliations
- Goethe University Frankfurt (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Weber, Patrick
- ORCID
- Weber, Patrick
- Venue
- International Journal of Knowledge Management
- Publisher
- IGI Global Scientific Publishing
- Published
- 2023-01-27
- Volume
- 19
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1-19
- ISSN
- 1548-0658 (ISSN-L)
- 1548-0666
- OpenAlex
- W4318307490
- Cited by
- 31
- References
- 49
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 7
- FWCI
- 9.01
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- ng
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- International Journal of Knowledge Management (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › AI and HR Technologies
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Impact of AI and Big Data on Business and Society
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Artificial Intelligence Applications
- Keywords
- artificial intelligence, human resource management, optimism bias, small and medium-sized enterprises, cost reduction, efficiency improvement, job displacement
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