The bright side of AI in hiring: Collaborating with algorithms supports ethical decision-making

• Explores how AI affects responsibility attribution in ethical violations in Human Resource Management. • Examines differences in moral perception of ethical breaches by AI vs. human teams. • Highlights AI’s influence on managers’ ethical decision-making and use of personal data. • Challenges the “responsibility gap” concept in AI-human collaboration in ethical contexts. • Provides insights into designing AI systems that support ethical behavior in HR processes. In this study, we use principal-agent theory and attribution theory to examine how AI’s support during ethical violations in the hiring process influences decision-making and how it can be explained by the perception of who is responsible for that violation. In three between-subject experiments, we exposed managers to vignettes describing an AI or human norm violation during the hiring process. The results show a bright side of AI arising from the finding that managers might be more ethical when sharing HR tasks with algorithms than with other people in organizations because working with AI limits assigning responsibility to other humans. It also exposes nuances between responsibility attribution and human behavior with AI in the hiring context.