Employees' Attitude towards a Digital Teammate-Will AI-enabled Chatbot Lead to Enhancing Employees' Job Identity?

Recently Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled conversational agents or chatbots (ICA hereafter) have been widely introduced in online customer service, and are expected to transform the frontline workforce. However, most studies from employees' perspectives have been qualitative in nature. Moreover, extant empirical studies perceive ICA as a tool rather than considering ICA as an AI-enabled digital workforce. Besides, rare papers moved further to explore the rooted psychological drivers (such as identity) underlying the employees' actions. To address these gaps, our paper integrates the identity theory and cooperation perspectives to examine the impact of ICA's human-like capability on employees' job identity through the enhancement in work experience. Our study is expected to provide an innovative perspective viewing ICA as a human-like agent rather than a tool in behavior studies. This study also enriches the identity theory and cooperation-competition theory and promotes their applications in IS literature.