Workers Who Fear Their Jobs Are Disappearing Start Behaving Badly, a New Study Finds

The rapid spread of artificial intelligence (AI) tools automating an array of work tasks hasn’t only caused many employees to for for the future of their jobs. It’s also led some of those chagrined workers to start behaving badly in the workplace.

The predicted job apocalypse that skeptics warned would result from widespread AI deployment hasn’t materialized—yet, anyway. But employees still remain worried that the tech may eventually replace millions of humans in the workplace. Now, a new study by Washington State University (WSU) researchers shows how those fears often translate into poor behavior by threatened workers. Those staffers, a report on the WSU news site says, are “more likely to slack off on the job, swipe a co-worker’s lunch or engage in other counterproductive workplace behavior.”

Why are vulnerable-feeling workers sluffing off, calling in sick, or pilfering their colleagues PBJs?

‘Moral disengagement’ leads to ‘counterproductive’ acts

According to the study published in the journal Occupational Health Science, the reason is that “occupation insecurity is positively associated with increased moral disengagement and subsequent counterproductive workplace behaviors.” It noted “the strength of this indirect effect increased as the level of industry exposure to AI increased.”

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That means people in professions like finance or accounting—whose jobs are being automated at higher levels than workers in farming or forestry—were more likely to let the resulting job fears push them into lives of lunch theft than less exposed workers.

The process by which AI-fearing workers start acting badly in the workplace is similar to those of people who mentally check out doing jobs they know they’re about to leave, or becoming inattentive and uncaring in relationships that appear doomed.