Turning Hindrances Into Challenges: Transformational Leadership Enhances Employees' Competitive Productivity in an Artificial Intelligence-Driven Hospitality Industry

Extant understanding on the role of leadership in shaping employee perceptions of embedding artificial intelligence- (AI-) enabled technologies in workplace environments as either challenges (opportunities) or hindrances (threats) is notably limited. To address this issue, a two-wave, time-lagged survey was conducted and usable data from 224 hospitality employees were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), which, in turn, highlighted the importance of transformational leadership in fulfilling the three fundamental psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in a workplace environment enabled by AI technologies. Significantly, meeting the needs for autonomy and relatedness fosters a perception of AI-enabled technologies as challenges to overcome and facilitates the positive appraisal of hindrances. Autonomy, in particular, emerged as a key determinant of this positive perspective. Noteworthily, employees who view AI-enabled technologies as challenges demonstrated a favorable correlation with their competitive productivity. These insights, in turn, contribute to the theoretical generalizability and extension of self-determination theory by integrating the challenge-hindrance appraisal framework and transformational leadership into the evolving discourse of the future of work shaped by AI-enabled technologies.