Priority structure and configurational pathways of professional role adaptation among university moral education teachers in the era of generative artificial intelligence

The continuing integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping the professional roles of university moral education teachers. Drawing on the theory of work role transitions and structured rating survey data from 70 university moral education teachers in China, this study combines the group analytic hierarchy process (group AHP) with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine the relative priority of conditions for professional role adaptation and their combinational relationships. The results show that teacher identity and institutional resource support both have relatively high subjective priority, but their configurational patterns in professional role adaptation differ: teacher identity is present in both pathways associated with high professional role adaptation, whereas GenAI ethical discernment is specified in only one of them. Institutional resource support is configured differently depending on the combination of professional competence and GenAI-related role strain, indicating that its subjective priority does not imply that it is indispensable in every context of high professional role adaptation. Further findings indicate that higher levels of professional role adaptation are associated with combinations featuring relatively sufficient GenAI pedagogical competence, teacher identity, and institutional resource support, but may also occur in contexts with relatively insufficient GenAI pedagogical competence and institutional resource support, high GenAI ethical discernment, and low GenAI-related role strain. This suggests that professional role adaptation among moral education teachers in the GenAI context is not a simple accumulation of the sufficiency of individual resources, but an adaptation state characterized by differentiated configurational relationships among professional identity, ethical judgment, practical competence, and organizational context. The study reveals differences between teachers’ subjective judgments of the importance of conditions for professional role adaptation and the specific configurational relationships among these conditions, providing empirical evidence for understanding the continuity of teachers’ professional mission, adjustments to boundaries of responsibility, and the contextual nature of professional role adaptation during technological change.