Here is an excerpt from an article written by for Harvard Business Review. To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Image Credit: Viktor Solomin/Stocksy
* * *
As gen AI takes over tasks that were once considered uniquely human, workers are starting to perceive their roles and their organizational value differently. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? To explore that question, we integrated psychological theories of motivation, performance, and well-being at work and interdisciplinary research on how gen AI affects knowledge, tasks, and the social characteristics of worker productivity and work itself. We found that a lot depends on whether workers feel that gen AI satisfies or frustrates three key psychological needs: competence (the feeling of being effective and capable); autonomy (the feeling of being in control of one’s actions); and relatedness (the feeling of having meaningful interpersonal connections). When those needs are met, employees embrace gen AI as a helpful tool and copilot. But when they’re not, employees feel threatened, at times even existentially, and balk at using gen AI.
Today many workers fall into that second camp. According to a 2025 survey by the IT-infrastructure-services company Kyndryl that spanned 25 industries in eight countries, 45% of CEOs believe that most employees are either resistant or openly hostile to the use of gen AI in the workplace. A significant part of the problem is that most companies lack a change management strategy for implementing gen AI and don’t provide formal training to help employees use it. Given those deficiencies, it’s not surprising that a rift has opened between leaders and managers on the one hand and workers on the other: A 2025 survey conducted by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that 85% of leaders and 78% of managers regularly use gen AI, whereas only 51% of workers do.
To help leaders address workers’ resistance, we’ve developed a framework for integrating gen AI at work. In this article we’ll explain how gen AI can support or threaten three basic psychological needs. Then we’ll introduce our framework and describe how to use it to increase workers’ receptivity to gen AI, their motivation to use it, and their level of engagement.
Psychological Impact
Research has shown that in rapidly evolving workplaces, leaders who can satisfy employees’ need to feel competent, in control, and connected are able to foster adaptability, learning, and well-being on their teams. The experiences of physicians and screenwriters—two professional groups whose responses to gen AI have received a lot of attention—support this idea. Let’s look at their differing reactions to AI integration efforts.
Competence.
Gen AI enables all kinds of workers to boost their capabilities. It can help those without technical expertise to perform high-skill tasks and those with expertise to expand their competencies. The result, as Mark Zuckerberg said last year, is that gen AI makes it possible for motivated workers to “accomplish way more than they ever could before.” Research led by one of us (Stefano)—an annual, large-scale survey by Wharton and GBK Collective of senior decision-makers at large U.S. companies—confirms that most leaders share this sense of unfolding possibility: Eighty-nine percent of respondents say that gen AI enhances employees’ skills.
According to the American Medical Association’s most recent AI sentiment report, that’s also the predominant view among medical professionals: They’re optimistic that AI will improve patient care. “Multimodal AI will allow us to create a high-resolution view of a human being,” the physician Eric Topol said in a 2024 address, “delivering individualized medicine that spans the patient’s entire life.” The evidence seems to suggest that gen AI is indeed boosting the competence of medical professionals: It can assist and improve diagnostics, patient interactions, and medical forecasting.
However, because gen AI can automate many routine tasks and support complex ones, its integration in the workplace can be experienced as a threat to workers’ competence. This often happens when gen AI redefines the capabilities that workers need or when it seems on track to replace them entirely. Worries about this outcome are common. In the Wharton and GBK survey of senior decision-makers, 71% said that they believe gen AI will lead to the atrophy of employee skills and will replace employees, at least for some tasks. Even some highly skilled employees worry that gen AI is reducing workers’ competence. For instance, in screenwriting and other creative industries, competence is demonstrated through accumulated professional experience. If gen AI replaces employees doing entry-level work, then how would the younger generation acquire competence or credibility? According to Danny Tolli, a TV writer and executive producer, “There is no way the company is going to give a show running opportunity to a writer who has no credits on their résumé.”
. . .
The gen AI revolution is redefining the boundary between people and machines. Its humanlike capabilities make workers view gen AI not just as a new technological system or software but as a social actor—and even a teammate—in the workplace. As a result, leaders can’t think about integrating gen AI in purely technical, operational, or cost-efficiency terms. The AWARE framework enables leaders to respect the psychological realities of change, foster psychological safety, and ensure that the technology augments, rather than replaces, human workers. In the end we all must recognize that gen AI is not merely a tool, and workers are not merely users. They should be partners in co-creating the future of work.
* * *
Here is a direct link to the complete article.