My Boss the Computer: A Bayesian analysis of socio-demographic and cross-cultural determinants of attitude toward the Non-Human Resource Management

Human resource management technologies have moved from biometric surveillance to emotional artificial intelligence (AI) that monitor employees’ engagement and productivity, analyze video interviews and CVs of job applicants. The rise of the US$20 billion emotional AI industry will transform the future workplace. Yet, besides no international consensus on the principles or standards for such technologies, there is a lack of cross-cultural research on future job seekers’ attitude toward such use of AI technologies. This study collects a cross-sectional dataset of 1,015 survey responses of international students from 48 countries and 8 regions worldwide. A majority of the respondents (52%) are concerned about being managed by AI. Following the hypothetico-deductivist philosophy of science, we use the MCMC Hamiltonian approach and conduct a detailed comparison of 10 Bayesian network models with the PSIS-LOO method. We consistently find having a higher income, being male, majoring in business, and/or self-rated familiarity with AI correlate with a more positive view of emotional AI in the workplace. There is also a stark cross-cultural and cross-regional difference. Our analysis shows people from economically less developed regions (Africa, Oceania, Central Asia) tend to exhibit less concern for AI managers. And for East Asian countries, 64% of the Japanese, 56% of the South Korean, and 42% of the Chinese professed the trusting attitude. In contrast, an overwhelming majority of 75% of the European and Northern American possesses the worrying/neutral attitude toward being managed by AI. Regarding religion, Muslim students correlate with the most concern toward emotional AI in the workplace (β_Islam_Attitude’s mean =-0.16, sd =0.10; β_Buddhism_Attitude’s mean =-0.05, sd =0.07; β_Christian_Attitude ‘s mean = -0.10, sd= 0.09). When religiosity is higher, the correlation becomes stronger for Muslim and Buddhist students. This paper adds a cross-cultural perspective to the literature, which is currently skewed toward country-specific and profession-specific samples.