Featured faculty: Choi Sungwoo
Written by Pan Jingyi

Derek Mobley had applied to more than 100 jobs over several years and had admittedly received rejection notices within minutes or hours. Confused and furious, the US citizen sued Workday, a human resources software firm that handled most of his applications, alleging that its artificial intelligence (AI) screened out his applications based on his age, race, and disabilities.

While Workday has argued that it’s not liable for hiring decisions, a court conditionally certified the age discrimination claims last year. This highly anticipated lawsuit will set a new precedent for AI-driven hiring practices and serves as a reminder that handing over employment decisions to algorithms can lead to backlash.

AI has inevitably reshaped human resource management, as also seen across industries today. A 2025 survey from Resume Builder shows that a majority of US managers have relied on AI for high-stakes decisions, such as promotions, rises and even layoffs. Akin to a dystopian Black Mirror episode, bosses are turning to machines to decide who’s in and who’s out.

Although more and more companies embed automation into their human resource operations, little is known about the impact on employee morale when their career is in the hands of a non-human actor. This is the puzzle that Choi Sungwoo, Assistant Professor of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School, seeks to answer.

Professor Choi uncovers a latent repercussion of advanced technology in human resource management: organisational dehumanisation. “Organisational dehumanisation is the feeling of being reduced to a mere functional component of an organisation, much like a single bolt in a large machine, where your unique qualities, emotions and individuality are largely disregarded.”

Why AI can feel dehumanising

In a study titled AI in human resource management: A driver of organisational dehumanisation and negative employee reactions, Professor Choi works with Shin Hyejo of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Kim Hyunsu of the University of Macau on three scenario-based online experiments. They recruited nearly 700 participants through Prolific, an online platform widely used in academic research.

“When AI performs human resources operations, employee characteristics are seen as numbers. Therefore, employees would feel like they are not treated as humans.”

Professor Choi Sungwoo

Across all three experiments, participants were asked to imagine that decisions about their promotion or performance review were being made either by an AI system or by a human manager. The results were consistent: people reacted more negatively when the decision-maker was AI.

Those reactions were not trivial. Participants reported lower commitment, stronger turnover intentions, and even greater retaliatory feelings when seeing AI deciding their livelihood. In practice, they are more likely to search for another job and warn others to avoid working for the company.

A couple of factors drive such dehumanising feelings, Professor Choi notes. AI lacks the ability to understand social norms, personal issues and ethical concerns as a human manager can. AI also works in incomprehensible ways to laypeople, and employees may fail to understand how AI reaches its conclusions. As a result, they feel powerless and excluded from the decision-making process.

“Putting it all together, loss of empathy, transparency, and control can leave people feeling objectified,” Professor Choi says. “When AI performs human resources operations, employee characteristics are seen as numbers. Therefore, employees would feel like they are not treated as humans.”

Can human resources automation thrive?

Different companies have different sentiments towards AI. Professor Choi and his collaborators identify what they describe as a cultural paradox: companies with more collaborative and family-like cultures may experience greater resistance to AI in human resources management.

In these collaborative environments, employees believe that the management values cooperation, support and interpersonal relationships. If AI is then used to make major decisions, the technology can clash with such a principle.

“When a collegial workplace adopts AI for major human resource decisions, it can feel like a betrayal,” Professor Choi explains. “Employees experience a dissonance between the human-centred values the culture espouses and the perceived quantification of their worth that AI involvement implies.”

By contrast, the negative effects of AI appear to be less intense in companies with a more outcome-oriented system, where performance and results are already prioritised over interpersonal connections. But that does not mean AI is entirely harmless in such settings.

Even in outcome-focused organisations, AI-driven decisions on the workforce can still backfire and brew dehumanisation. Companies that deploy an AI system to select the most suitable candidates for promotion still see employees feel their aspirations or contributions are overlooked.

In short, whether focusing on outcomes or collaborations, the company needs to take the human aspect into account when adopting AI in human resources operations.

Keep “human” in human resources

Reputation is a valuable asset for a company. When job marketplaces like Glassdoor, Indeed, Seek, and even Google nowadays provide user-generated company reviews, the efficiency gains from AI might be quickly diminished by a wave of criticism from current and former employees.

For companies and business leaders, the message is not to abandon AI, but to use it wisely. One priority, Professor Choi says, is transparent communication. “Companies should clearly explain why AI adoption in human resources is necessary and reassure employees that it does not compromise the organisation’s core commitment to supportive and human-oriented growth.”

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Rather than allowing AI to make decisions on its own, Professor Choi suggests designing systems that enable humans and technology to coexist. “This hybrid approach helps preserve the sense that consequential decisions about people are ultimately made by people. If AI serves only in an assistive capacity with limited input into the final decision, the dehumanisation effect should be substantially mitigated.”

“Human resource practices are highly sensitive, and AI could be most valuable in managing less critical yet voluminous tasks, such as initial application screening, freeing human managers to focus on more complex and high-stakes decisions,” Professor Choi adds. “Despite that, companies should always be mindful of the risks of dehumanising feelings and act accordingly.”

The post Would you trust AI to decide your pay rise? first appeared on China Business Knowledge.

Featured faculty: Li Wendong
Written by Gigi Wong

Those who have worked long enough may still recall the feelings of receiving their first paycheques. After years passed, many would have realised how far they had come, and more importantly, how their personalities or the people they know had evolved over the years. At some quiet hour, a random thought may pop up: Do we shape our income, or does our income shape who we are?

A new study suggests our personalities and our paycheques may be more intertwined than we realise, each influencing the other over time in a reciprocal dance. “When income increases, it signals that the current career progress is significant and the status in society is improving,” says Li Wendong, Associate Professor in the Department of Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School.

Professor Li’s latest study challenges the assumption that our personalities are relatively fixed and set in stone, that a person is always either an introvert or an extrovert, agreeable or argumentative, cautious or reckless. Furthermore, his paper titled A continuous time meta-analyses of reciprocal relationships between personality traits and income suggests that some personality traits can also predict future income changes.

His study also found an overlooked drawback of pay rises. Positive reinforcement that comes with income increases may lead employees to stick to routines and conventional ways of doing work, eventually limiting them from exploring new approaches to improve their performance.

“Such a positive reinforcement likely prompts employees to exploit the current effective work methods and strategies further. Over time, changes in such behaviours, thoughts and feelings likely foster personality change.”

“Thus, after a pay rise, organisations may also consider using incentives to motivate employees to come up with novel strategies to complete their work responsibilities and think out of the box to spur creativity and innovation,” he adds.

Which came first: pay rise or personality change?

Along with his PhD students, as well as Zhang Zhen of Southern Methodist University, Zhang Xin of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Christian Dormann of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Professor Li analysed data from 11 large national and regional longitudinal studies in the world involving 134,551 participants in total.

Studies were included if they measured at least one of the Big Five personality traits and individual income at three or more time points. These personality traits refer to five broad dimensions of personality that make each person unique, including emotional stability, conscientiousness (e.g., being dependable and hardworking), agreeableness (e.g., friendliness), extraversion (e.g., being outgoing), and openness (e.g., being curious and open to new experiences).

The team integrated findings across all the studies, which followed participants over periods ranging from four to nineteen years. The researchers also examined patterns of personality change and income shifts within the same individuals over time, painting a much richer picture than a simple snapshot study.

They found that conscientiousness and emotional stability tended to increase following a boost in income. The results also demonstrated significant effects of income changes on subsequent changes in both traits.

“While an income increase can make employees more stable and reliable, it may also reduce their tendency to seek novel strategies and goals — that is, their exploratory, creative and risk-taking behaviours may decline.”

Professor Li Wendong

In other words, a fatter paycheque seems to make employees more disciplined, dependable, poised, and unflappable over time. On the other side, as expected, people who became more conscientious and emotionally stable went on to see larger income increases over the next several years.

On the contrary, there was a negative reciprocal relationship between extraversion and income: being more extroverted seems to make people less likely to earn more money later on and earning more salary appears to make people more introverted at a later point in time. The effects of conscientiousness, emotional stability, and extraversion on income fluctuate over time, with the strongest impact occurring around one year after personality traits were assessed and tend to weaken afterwards.

Other personality traits have a negative relationship with the pay rise. The effect of income on changes in agreeableness is negative and the relationship between agreeableness and change in income is unclear.

“Increases in conscientiousness and emotional stability are positively related to subsequent increases in the employee’s income over time,” says Professor Li. “Our analyses also revealed that the reciprocal effect between extraversion and income was negative and significant across different time points.”

Success rewires our inner traits

Income-personality link cuts both ways, but what explains these intriguing connections between who we are and what ends up in our bank accounts? The researchers propose a few rationales, drawing on the cybernetic Big Five theory.

As mentioned above, pay rises reinforce our current strategies and behaviours at work, and in turn, motivate us to hone and further exploit those strategies. This results in deepening the motivational stability or conscientiousness quality, as well as emotional stability and social stability.

However, the cybernetic Big Five theory suggests that income increases are less likely to provide incentives for employees’ exploration and risk-taking behaviours, which may further enhance extraversion and openness traits. Based on empirical findings, the researchers posit that all five traits above correspond to one of the two broad dimensions of the Big Five that are associated with career strategies: stability and plasticity traits.

Extraversion and openness are included in plasticity traits, which encourage exploration by generating novel strategies when old plans prove insufficient, or when environmental changes occur, allowing for adaptation in uncertain environments. Stability traits comprise conscientiousness, emotional stability, and agreeableness, which primarily serve to maintain stability and prevent disruption to ongoing strategies for achieving long-term goals.

When experiencing a career setback, employees are likely to adjust their strategies and explore novel approaches or acquire new strategies to advance their careers —a characteristic of openness. They may also become more extroverted and enhance their social capital for career development or for exploring other alternatives. These changes over time may get habitualised across various life domains.

“The idea that income increases confidence and exploration remains a theoretical possibility, but our empirical evidence suggests that, over time, higher income may instead lead to more stability and less exploratory behaviour or lower extraversion, likely because employees settle into effective, established work strategies rather than seeking novelty,” Professor Li says.

Career development and pay incentives

The upshot is that our personalities are not entirely fixed to our job descriptions. As we progress through our careers, our personality inevitably gets imprinted by our professional successes and stumbles, but those experiences also get funnelled back into further shaping our future fortunes, for better or worse.

According to Professor Li, the findings have important practical implications for employees and organisations. Earning a higher income may make us more conscientious and emotionally stable over time, but also diminish our extroverted and explorative tendencies to find novel strategies.

Employees should be mindful of these potential shifts, he advises, to better navigate their career development. Organisations, too, should take note that the common workplace practice of using pay rises to motivate staff may have some unintended consequences on employees’ personality development.

“Given that many organisations tend to employ pay rises as an important incentive scheme to motivate their employees, the findings suggest that organisations should also be aware of positive and perhaps, unintended consequences of pay rises,” he adds.

“While an income increase can make employees more stable and reliable, it may also reduce their tendency to seek novel strategies and goals — that is, their exploratory, creative and risk-taking behaviours may decline. This may lead to adverse consequences for organisations in adapting to new and uncertain environments.”

To mitigate the adverse effects of pay rises, Professor Li emphasises the importance of acknowledging the benefits and risks, and find a way to balance stability and creativity. Companies need to adopt practices that encourage employees to explore new ideas, such as supportive management and more job autonomy, to foster intrinsic motivation and creativity.

The post Your paycheque may change your personality, and vice versa first appeared on China Business Knowledge.

By Fang Ying, Senior Writer, China Business Knowledge @ CUHK

In this age of rapid technological advancement, the demand from companies for their employees to be more creative has never been stronger. Now research by CUHK Business School reveals how even limited resources can be used to unleash employees’ creativity. Companies that actively engage in creating an environment that is viewed by employees as being supportive and open with information, is more likely to promote their staff’s creativity skills.

In other words, firms’ High-Commitment Work Systems (HCWS), which include a bundle of internally consistent human resource practices, including extensive training, employee stock options, profit-sharing plans, and developmental performance appraisals, can positively predict individual employees’ creativity.

However, the impact of HCWS on individual creativity is based on how closely together the team works, and how complex their task. This is the finding of a research conducted by Song Chang, Assistant Professor at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School and his collaborators from Nanjing University and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Collecting data from a random sample of 55 high-technology firms, 238 teams and 1059 individuals in one of China’s eastern provinces, the research investigates a multilevel combinational model of employee creativity. It hypothesize that firm’s HCWS are conducive to individual creativity. But the researchers also assume that this positive impact may be combined with other factors, including team cohesion and team task complexity.

Stated simply, the more united a work team is, and the most complex tasks they have, the greater the impact of using High-commitment work systems (HCWS) will have on the individual creativity of each team member.

Working with HR executives on the specific data collection plan at each firm, the researchers distributed three separate survey questionnaires to the respondents. These respondents included HR executives, supervisors and individual employees. They were asked to rate the HCWS used in the firms, team cohesion and team task complexity as well as individual creativity. The researchers offered different measurement scales for respondents to measure the above three variables. For example, a sample item for firms’ HCWS is: “In our company, we emphasize the appraisal of team performance rather than individual performance;” for team cohesion and team task complexity: “How much technical knowledge do the jobs in this unit require;” for creativity: ”This subordinate seeks new ideas and ways to solve problems.”

The surveys’ results provide support for the hypotheses. The results showed that providing HCWS would be beneficial to employee creativity. What’s more important, the impact of HCWS on employee creativity was improved when teams were more cohesive and when the collective tasks handled by the team were more complex.

Why is this the case? According to the research paper, firms with HCWS would create a policy of clearing communicating to their employees that the company was willing to devote valuable resources to help them to develop and grow.

This caring environment helps learning and knowledge sharing in the workplace. And in turn, this supportive policy promotes employee creativity. However, employees within a single organization that are subjected to the same set of HR practices may still differ in their performance.

When team members are encouraged by HCWS to learn new information and skills, teams with higher cohesion may benefit more because unified teams can create “a shared context where individuals can interact with each other and engage in constant group discussions. Therefore team members are likely to communicate more effectively and develop more innovative ideas.

At the same time, teams vary significantly in the amount of complexity inherent in their jobs. To complete challenging and demanding tasks, employees may need to have better ability and motivation to come up with creative solutions. Therefore, when tasks are challenging and when companies also invest heavily in HCWS, the impact of HCWS on employee creativity will be optimized because employees really need to have the necessary specific skills and creative-talent to develop new ideas and solve such challenging problems.

Practical Implications

Understanding such relationships among HCWS, team cohesion, task complexity, and employee creativity, companies can actually use it to unleash their employees’ creativity – even with limited time or finances.

According to the paper, investment in HCWS is costly, and companies with limited resources should be well aware of the conditions when such investment will have higher (or lower) payoffs and prioritize their allocation of resources.

“Overall,” say the researchers, “investment in strategic human resource management alone is not sufficient; HR functions or directors can be strategic partners of focal firms only when they have the ‘HR intelligence’ to diagnose the specific external and internal conditions and help firms make optimized choices in managing people.

The post The Key to Increasing Creativity at Work first appeared on China Business Knowledge.