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Three Essays on Artificial Intelligence and Creativity in Organizations

PhD Thesis Defense

This dissertation focuses on two timely phenomena in organizational behavior: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and creativity. AI is rapidly spreading in organizations and can now perform “creative” tasks that used to be the cornerstone of humans. I focus on how the performance of “creative” tasks—e.g., recruiting or producing visual content—by AI impacts human agents’ attitudes and behaviors. As creativity is a social process, I expand the focus to study how group errors relate to workplace creativity. Folk theories are the theoretical fil rouge of this dissertation: Folk theories guide assessments and decisions when individuals are faced with ambiguous circumstances, such as evaluating a painting made by AI, interpreting the occurrence of an error, or the selection of new recruits. In Essay 1 I build on folk psychology to examine whether people evaluate creativity of a target differently when they are told that the producer is AI or human. With four experimental studies I found that people sometimes discount the creativity of a production when it is described as made by AI rather than humans, but also that this bias is not ubiquitous, and rather depends on influences both internal and external to the evaluator. In Essay 2 I study how the utilization of AI in recruitment impacts job applicants’ attraction to an organization. Building on signaling theory, with four experimental studies I show that warmth (but not competence) perceptions drive the influence of the recruiter’s identity as AI (vs human) on recruitment outcomes. This indirect effect is moderated by job applicants’ familiarity with AI. In Essay 3, taking a threat-rigidity perspective, I study how the occurrence of errors can engender creativity in teams through appraisals of errors as threats and opportunities, and how need for closure moderates the impact of errors on appraisals.


Speaker :
Mr. Federico Magni
Venue :
via Zoom
Date :
Time :