Is non-intervention feasible? How laissez-faire leadership moderates the relationship between AI usage and service employee empathetic creativity

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are becoming increasingly prevalent in hospitality industries for customer services. However, human employees remain indispensable in the service workplace due to their superior people skills compared to AI. How to leverage AI to enhance the strengths of human employees and establish a synergistic employee-AI hybrid team holds significant academic and practical value. Drawing on social interdependence theory, this study develops an integrative framework to examine employee-AI interactions under the role of laissez-faire leadership in the hospitality context. Results from a three-wave survey suggest that under laissez-faire leadership, employees working with AI experience increased role ambiguity and unrelieved workload, which further prevents them from exerting their comparative advantage of empathetic creativity. This research provides a comprehensive view for understanding the impact of AI on service employees under leadership, offering both theoretical and practical implications.