The integration of AI into work processes is associated with psychosocial and organizational risks for workers (OSHA.europa.eu, 2024). Aiming to examine such risks in HRM work, an area claimed to particularly benefit from AI tools, this study explores how HR professionals experience AI tools in relation to their work. This is done through the lens of Antonovsky’s Sense of Coherence (SOC) theory (1987), a salutogenic model that focuses on what makes people healthy or healthier, rather than on what creates illness.
The pillars of SOC are the concepts of comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness. Comprehensibility refers to how individuals perceive their world: as ordered and predictable, or chaotic and random. A person with a high sense of comprehensibility perceives stimuli as predictable, or, if they come as a surprise, at least possible to organize and explain. Manageability refers to the resources individuals perceive they have at their disposal to handle the stimuli they encounter, such as medical care, a supportive partner, or financial resources. Meaningfulness is about experiencing the demands we face as worth investing energy in to meet the challenge. The model's three components are interconnected; e.g., a high level of manageability generally presupposes a high level of comprehensibility, as a lack of understanding of one's situation makes it more difficult to see what resources are needed to manage the situation. According to Antonovsky, meaningfulness is likely the most important component, as a person who feels motivation and engagement can strive to understand the world and obtain the necessary resources. SOC has been widely used in occupational health research, primarily quantitatively, to investigate well-being in workplaces to better understand deficiencies and success factors in the work environment. In our study, SOC has served as a theoretical framework to understand and qualitatively analyze the experience of the work environment, rather than as a tool to establish causal relationships between SOC and health, which is what Antonovsky originally developed the model for. Yet, he encouraged the use of other methods to gain further understanding of the relationship between SOC and health and the model has been used in qualitative research with various empirical focuses.
The use of specifically developed AI tools within HR is still significantly limited in Sweden. However, AI is integrated into many of the tools used in daily office work, such as search engines and social media. For this study, 31 interviews with 37 HR directors, managers and professionals were executed. Questions were asked about the (limited) use of AI tools today, and about expectations for future AI use and on how such use might affect the content of HR work and their work environment. The use of Antonovsky's theory in our analysis came from our reading of the empirical material where initial themes were identified that could be related to the components of meaningfulness, comprehensibility, and manageability. In other words, an inductive reading of the material led us to SOC, which was then used deductively in a second reading, coded under the three components. In the next step, 40 themes were identified, which we grouped into seven empirical categories. These themes, and thus the seven categories, spanned the entire SOC model, in the sense that each category contained themes that related to more than one of the components. For example, the category "The Irreplaceable Human" in our material relates to comprehensibility through the theme of employees' perception of the unique human understanding of context; to manageability through the theme of employees' perception of the unique human ability to handle human complexity, make interpretations, and understand context; and to meaningfulness through employees' perception of the value of human emotions and judgment in decision-making.
In this way, our study illustrates how HR employees' experiences of, and expectations about, AI in the workplace relate to comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness, i.e., their SOC at work, as well as the SOC they expect to experience when AI is more extensively integrated. We do not directly evaluate whether comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness are high or low, but by qualitatively analyzing how SOC is expressed, the study explores how employees perceive their current and future work environment in which AI is a part. The results show a justified concern about how HR work may be affected by increased use of AI. There is a risk of reduced space for collaboration in the form of dialogue between different parties when AI-generated materials are viewed as definitive rather than as bases for discussion. Combined with the risk of HR losing influence when tasks are taken over by AI tools, our data show that HR employees' sense of meaningfulness, comprehensibility, and manageability are likely to be affected.
2025.