AI role expectancy in human-AI teaming

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), AI has gradually evolved from a purely instrumental system into an intelligent agent capable of participating in team tasks and performing functions such as information processing, decision support, and task execution. Human–AI teaming has therefore become an important topic of shared interest across organizational management, human–computer interaction, information systems, and team research. Previous research on human-AI teaming mainly took the technology-driven approach, focusing on enhancing AI capabilities to optimize human-AI collaboration. However, the one who people prefer to collaborate with in the workplace may not be the "perfect" AI agent, but rather the one that best aligns with their expectations of its role within the team. Accordingly, understanding the team roles played by AI and how these roles influence the formation, operation, and collaborative effectiveness of human–AI teams has become a pressing question in current research on human–AI collaboration. Do people hold different expectations regarding whether and how AI should assume a team role? How do such expectations about AI's team role influence human–AI collaboration? To address these questions, the present research proposes the psychological construct of AI team role expectancy, which describes individuals' subjective expectations regarding what role AI should assume in future teams, and further examines how AI team role expectancy affects human–AI collaboration.