Exploring Underrepresented Employee Perceptions of AI Receptivity Through Leaders’ Stakeholder Engagement
Citation. Welch, N. (2025). Exploring underrepresented employee perceptions of AI receptivity through leaders’ stakeholder engagement. Business Ethics and Leadership, 9(2), 108–119. https://doi.org/10.61093/bel.9(2).108-119.2025
Summary. This narrative literature review uses stakeholder theory to argue that AI-adoption approaches need to account for underrepresented employees’ concerns, including intersectionality, psychological safety, transparency, and ethical accountability. It proposes inclusive stakeholder engagement and culturally competent leadership communication as conditions that may support receptivity, and introduces a Chief People Readiness Officer role as an untested organizational response. The source is a public open-access review rather than a primary study of employee outcomes.
Key claims
- The review argues that generic AI-adoption frameworks such as TAM, UTAUT, and TPB insufficiently capture intersectional diversity, psychological safety, transparency, and ethical concerns that can shape underrepresented employees’ receptivity to AI.
- It synthesizes literature to propose that authentic stakeholder engagement, transparent communication, ethical accountability, and psychologically safe participation may reduce resistance and support AI receptivity among underrepresented employees.
- The proposed Chief People Readiness Officer would coordinate AI-transition engagement, psychological safety, and culturally responsive leadership, but the role has not been empirically evaluated.
- The review calls for longitudinal research and intersectional receptivity measures rather than treating employee receptivity as a homogeneous or static adoption variable.
Evidence & limitations
- Narrative literature review guided by stakeholder theory; it reports a keyword-based search across academic databases and thematic synthesis, not a preregistered systematic review or primary employee data collection.
- Its claims about engagement and receptivity are conceptual syntheses of heterogeneous cited evidence, so they do not establish causal effects for a specific employee group, workplace, or AI implementation.
- The article explicitly notes the absence of primary data, incomplete treatment of intersecting identities, and the lack of longitudinal evidence; its CPRO proposal remains a design hypothesis.
- Public provenance is verified through the Crossref record and the publisher landing page; the ingested Drive PDF is an open-access CC BY article dated 2025-07-04.