In the context of the digital transformation era, the extensive application of artificial intelligence (AI) is profoundly altering the workplace environment, thereby underscoring the critical need to elucidate its impact on employee innovation behavior. Such insights are essential for optimizing human resource management and enhancing organizational competitiveness. Grounded in cognitive evaluation theory, this study explores the underlying mechanisms through which AI usage influences employee innovation behavior and develops an integrated theoretical model that incorporates both employee personality traits and job characteristics. A two-wave questionnaire survey was conducted, and hierarchical regression analysis was employed to test the hypotheses using a sample of 339 employees from 13 manufacturing enterprises in China. The findings reveal that AI usage is positively associated with employee innovation behavior, with self-efficacy serving as a significant mediator. Furthermore, openness and job complexity positively moderate the relationship between AI usage and self-efficacy, thereby facilitating innovative behavior. Additionally, a moderated mediation mechanism was identified. The conclusions of this study not only enrich the theoretical understanding of how AI impacts employee innovation behavior but also offer practical guidance for organizations on leveraging AI to foster innovation during digital transformation.

Purpose: Based on the Social Information Processing Theory, a cross-level model was conducted to analyze the influence of new employees’ organizational socialization on team innovation performance via the mediating effect of employee voice behavior and the moderating effect of servant leadership. Methods: Survey data were collected from 352 new employees and 88 leaders at two stages in major Chinese innovation companies. Samples were involved technology and development, production and operation, marketing and sales, and functional management departments. The software Mplus 7.0 and AMOS 22.0 were used to test the hypotheses. Results: The cross-level results indicated that organizational socialization directly enhances new employee voice behavior and, accordingly, promotes team innovation performance. Additionally, servant leadership plays a moderating role between organizational socialization and prohibitive voice behavior but has no moderating effect on the relationship between organizational socialization and promotive voice behavior. Conclusion: The results enrich the research on the influencing mechanism of organizational socialization on team innovation performance and provide a theoretical basis and practical guidance for innovation enterprise leaders on how to promote team innovation performance.

Remote work has become a new way of working due to the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which inevitably aggravates team conflicts caused by cognitive differences given the lack of face-to-face communication. With a team climate perspective, this paper investigates the impact of the team leader’s conflict management style on team innovation performance in remote R&D teams in China based on social cognition theory and two-dimension theory. A theoretical model is constructed which describes the mediating effect of team psychological safety and the moderating impact of team trust. Paired data from 118 remote R&D teams in China including 118 leaders and 446 members were collected. The results show that team leader’s cooperative conflict management style is conducive to enhancing team psychological safety and further effectively improves team innovation performance. Therefore, team psychological safety has a mediating effect between team leader’s cooperative conflict management style and team innovation performance. In addition, team trust has a negative moderating effect between team leader’s cooperative conflict management style and team psychological safety. Besides, this study obtains some valuable culture-related insights and provides more views for conflict management research in the cross-cultural context since the samples in this study are from China, a society with high collectivism, which is different from the western cultural context from which many conflict management theories develop.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in organizational development, understanding how leadership shapes employee responses to AI is critical for fostering workplace innovation. Drawing on trait activation theory, this study develops a theoretical model in which employee AI trust enhances innovative performance through AI crafting. Paternalistic leadership serves as a situational moderator, while the leader’s AI opportunity perception functions as a higher-order moderator. A three-wave survey was conducted with 523 employees from 14 AI-intensive manufacturing firms in China. Results show that the interaction between AI trust and paternalistic leadership positively predicts both AI crafting and innovative performance. In addition, AI crafting mediates the effect of the interaction term on innovative performance. Furthermore, the leader’s AI opportunity perception moderates this interactive effect: when this perception is high, the positive impact of AI trust and paternalistic leadership on AI crafting is significantly stronger; when it is low, the effect weakens. These findings contribute to the literature by clarifying the situational and cognitive conditions under which AI trust promotes innovation, thereby extending trait activation theory to AI-enabled workplaces and offering actionable insights for leadership development in the intelligent era.

Occupational stigmatization in Chinese healthcare institutions has intensified due to negative public events (e.g., kickbacks, bribes, and patient conflicts). While previous studies have mainly focused on the negative effects of stigma on practitioners’ physiological and psychological states of practitioners with low prestige, little attention has been given to the moral psychological mechanisms involved or the potential positive outcomes. This study aims to explore the moral mechanisms of healthcare professionals’ perceived occupational stigma on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), with a specific focus on the potential effects of moral credibility loss, moral sensitivity, and occupational prestige. This study employed a hierarchical regression method to test the theoretical model, using data from 554 healthcare professionals (including 311 physicians and 243 nurses) from 7 hospitals in China. Confirmatory factor analysis, hierarchical regression, bootstrapping analysis (= 5000 times) and simple slope test using SPSS and AMOS were employed. The empirical results demonstrate that healthcare professionals’ occupational stigma enhances OCB by increasing moral credibility loss, with moral sensitivity playing a moderating role. Additionally, this study categorizes healthcare professionals into two groups based on occupational prestige: physicians (high occupational prestige) and nurses (relatively lower occupational prestige). The findings indicate that occupational prestige not only moderates the positive relationship between occupational stigma and moral credibility loss but also moderates the relationship between moral credibility loss and OCB. This study comprehensively explores healthcare professionals’ occupational stigma and reveals its positive moral effects, specifically in enhancing OCB through the moral cleansing perspective. These findings offer a novel understanding of occupational stigma, providing practical guidance for improving professional ethics and OCB.