Working with feeling AI in fashion retail: a stimulus-organism-response perspective on employee psychology and creativity

Abstract

As fashion retail organizations increasingly integrate emotionally responsive artificial intelligence (AI) into employee-facing systems, understanding the psychological and behavioral implications of “feeling AI” has become essential, particularly its influence on employee creativity, defined as the generation of novel and useful ideas. This study investigates how two feeling AI capabilities, anthropomorphism and personalization, shape employees’ creative self-efficacy and job replacement anxiety, and how these psychological states influence two distinct forms of employee creativity: proactive and responsive creativity. Drawing on the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework, a structural model was developed and tested using survey data collected from fashion retail employees (N = 302). Findings reveal that feeling AI does not uniformly enhance workplace creativity; instead, its psychological impacts are context-dependent and behaviorally divergent. This study contributes to fashion and organizational literature by expanding the conceptualization of AI from a technical enabler to a psychological stimulus with dualistic effects. The findings also offer practical guidance for fashion retailers aiming to adopt feeling AI systems that support, rather than stifle, human creativity in a rapidly evolving industry.