ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Transformational Leadership and Employee AI Usage:the role of Perceived Organizational Support and Competitive Workplace Climate
Provisionally accepted
- Hubei Polytechnic University, Huangshi, China
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Artificial intelligence (AI) has become integral to organizational transformation and daily management, making employee AI usage (AI-U) an increasingly prevalent phenomenon. Despite its growing importance, little is known about how leadership and contextual factors shape employees' usage of AI. Based on social cognitive theory, this study investigates the mediating role of perceived organizational support (POS) and the moderating effect of competitive workplace climate (CWC) in the relationship between transformational leadership (TL) and employee AI-U. Data were collected from 525 employees in China through an online survey and analyzed using hierarchical regression analysis and bootstrap methods. The results revealed that TL positively predicts employee AI-U, and that POS partially mediates this relationship. Moreover, CWC significantly moderates the indirect effect, such that the mediating effect of POS is weakened in high-level CWC. These findings enrich the understanding of AI adoption from a social cognitive perspective and offer practical insights for fostering supportive organizational conditions conducive to AI application.
Keywords: Transformational leadership, perceived organizational support, employee artificial intelligence usage, competitive workplace climate, social cognitive theory, moderated mediation model
Received: 22 Feb 2025; Accepted: 31 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 WANG, Liu and Ao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: HONG-YAN WANG, wanghongyan1981@126.com
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