When resilience backfires: the counterintuitive effect of employee resilience in high-tech surveillance environments

The pervasive integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into organizations demands a deeper understanding of its impact on employee psychological health, particularly through distinct pathways of control and transparency. Grounded in the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework, this time-lagged study of 482 managers in China’s manufacturing sector investigates how AI-based surveillance and AI-awareness influence psychological well-being through the parallel mediators of perceived autonomy and psychological distress, and how these relationships are moderated by employee resilience. Results from structural equation modeling revealed that AI-based surveillance undermined well-being by reducing autonomy and increasing distress. Conversely, AI-awareness enhanced well-being through these same psychological mechanisms. Challenging conventional wisdom, employee resilience acted as a double-edged sword: it amplified the positive relationship between AI-based surveillance and distress, and weakened the protective effect of AI-awareness on distress. These counterintuitive findings reveal a “pressure amplification effect,” where resilience may paradoxically increase vulnerability in high-stakes, algorithmically managed environments. The study contributes to the literature by delineating the dual mediating pathways of autonomy and distress, and by contextualizing the complex role of resilience in AI-enabled workplaces. Practically, it underscores the necessity of transparent AI implementation and tailored organizational support systems that move beyond one-size-fits-all resilience narratives.