Employee agility and technology self-efficacy: A framework for AI-HRM adoption in Malaysian hotels

Abstract

The growing adoption of artificial intelligence in human resource management is changing the way things are done in the hospitality industry. While customer-facing AI technologies have been widely addressed in previous studies, the adoption of AI-integrated HRM (AI-HRM) systems by employees has not received much attention. To bridge this gap, this conceptual paper synthesized relevant literature and combined the Stimulus-Organism-Response model with Social Cognitive Theory to describe employees’ adoption of AI-HRM. Grounded in these theories, this study positioned work-related use of enterprise social media (ESM) as a technological stimulus and employee agility as an organismic adaptive capability that turns digitally mediated work conditions into adoption behavior. Additionally, technology self-efficacy is suggested as both a direct predictor of AI-HRM adoption and a moderating cognitive boundary that influences the strength of the agility-adoption link. To ensure conceptual clarity, this paper defined AI-HRM as an umbrella term that captures the integration of AI into HRM functions, recognizing the variation in terminologies used in past literature. Theoretically, this paper suggests five propositions on how these identified constructs interact. Although no primary data were collected in this study, a moderated-mediation framework is presented to guide future empirical validation in the hotel context. The implications suggest that successful AI-HRM adoption may be achieved by developing employee agility and technology self-efficacy through capacity-building training and supportive digital collaboration conditions.