Agentic AI and Academic Workforce Resilience in Malaysian Higher Education: An Integrative HRD Framework

This conceptual paper develops an integrative Human Resource Development (HRD) framework for understanding academic workforce resilience in Malaysian higher education institutions (HEIs) under the disruptive conditions of Agentic AI. Drawing on Cascio's BANI framework, Hobfoll's Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, the professional identity perspective, and Strategic HRD theory, the paper synthesises a curated body of contemporary literature to explain how technological disruption becomes a workforce-resilience problem. The framework advances four theoretical propositions. First, BANI conditions generate distinct resource threats through structural brittleness, professional anxiety, non-linear skill depreciation, and algorithmic incomprehensibility. Second, strategic HRD architectures can alter these appraisal pathways by replenishing individual and institutional resources. Third, sustained resilience depends on professional identity reconstruction from task-centred 'doing' towards human-centred 'being'. Fourth, agile governance and AI-adaptive leadership provide the institutional conditions through which individual resilience can contribute to organizational antifragility. The paper reframes academic resilience as a systemic HRD outcome rather than an individual coping responsibility and identifies a theory-led agenda for empirical testing in Malaysia and comparable ASEAN higher education contexts.