AI adoption and employee innovation for sustainability: Insights from employee engagement perspectives

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being incorporated into daily work processes in technology companies, thereby creating an environment for sustainability-oriented innovation. This research aims to investigate how employees’ intentions to adopt artificial intelligence drive innovative work behavior in support of resource-conserving innovations and digitalized green practices in information technology companies. Employees’ engagement is used as a mediator in this process. A model is proposed based on Social Exchange Theory (SET) to explain why supportive organizational contexts drive employees to explore artificial intelligence and translate this experience into practical innovations. A dataset of 450 IT employees is used through purposive sampling. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) is used to test the proposed relationships. The findings indicate that artificial intelligence adoption intentions have a strong positive relationship with innovative work behavior. Employees’ engagement is also found to mediate a significant portion of this relationship. This research contributes to existing theories of sustainability-oriented innovation diffusion by identifying artificial intelligence adoption intentions as an emerging driver of employees’ innovation in technology companies.