Job Replacement Anxiety and Approach-Avoidance Job Crafting: The Roles of Regulatory Focus and AI Literacy

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in organizational processes, concerns about job replacement by AI have become increasingly widespread and gradually influenced work behaviors. However, existing research has not yet fully explained how job replacement anxiety affects job crafting. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, the study develops a moderated dual-path mediation model to examine the relationships between job replacement anxiety and approach and avoidance job crafting from a motivational perspective. Promotion focus and prevention focus are introduced to explain the underlying psychological transformation processes. The study further investigates the moderating role of AI literacy. The empirical analysis was based on three-wave matched survey data from 583 Chinese employees with a broadly balanced gender distribution. The results indicate that job replacement anxiety was indirectly and negatively associated with approach job crafting through lower promotion focus, while an opposing positive direct association resulted in a nonsignificant overall association. For avoidance job crafting, job replacement anxiety had a positive association through higher prevention focus. AI literacy buffered the effects of job replacement anxiety on both forms of regulatory focus and weakened the corresponding indirect effects. The findings suggest that job replacement anxiety is linked to employee job crafting through differentiated motivational pathways and identify AI literacy as an important boundary condition for explaining employees’ adaptation to AI-driven change. These findings advance job crafting research and AI anxiety research by focusing on the job replacement anxiety dimension and offer implications for employee adaptation during AI-driven organizational transformation.