Letting Go and Taking Up: How Paradoxical Leadership Shapes Frontline Employees’ Transition to AI in Turkey’s Hotels

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing frontline work in hotels. Employees must abandon familiar tools while adopting new ones. This study examines how paradoxical leader behavior (PLB) relates to frontline employees’ unlearning of obsolete tools and their discretionary AI adoption. Drawing on paradox theory and social cognitive theory, it proposes that AI learning readiness self-efficacy carries these effects. Three-wave data were collected from 275 frontline employees in hotels in Turkey and analyzed with confirmatory factor analysis and bootstrapped mediation analysis. PLB was positively related to AI learning readiness self-efficacy. Self-efficacy, in turn, was related to unlearning obsolete tools and to AI adoption. The indirect effects were significant. PLB also retained a direct association with unlearning and AI adoption. The findings extend research on paradoxical leadership, unlearning, and technology adoption in hospitality. They suggest that supervisors who combine structure with flexibility help employees believe they can learn AI, and this belief eases the move from old tools to new ones. Implications for hotel managers and tourism policy in emerging economies are discussed.