Using AI At Work Might Undermine The Boss' Trust In You, Study Warns

Key TakeawaysUsing AI at work might be detrimental to your careerSupervisors found employees less trustworthy if they used AIThis lack of trust could harm performance evaluations and promotion prospects.MONDAY, Nov. 9, 2026 (HealthDay News) — There might be a price to your career for using AI at work, even if the tools lead to better productivity, a new study says.Employees who rely on tools like ChatGPT are trusted less by their supervisors, potentially harming future performance evaluations and promotion prospects, researchers report in the December issue of the journal The Leadership Quarterly.Study participants acting as supervisors consistently penalized known AI users, choosing to check their work rather than trust their efforts, researchers found.This occurred both when workers were not explicitly prohibited from using AI and when company policy encouraged employees to make AI part of their work process, researchers found. “AI is changing not only how we work, but also how we judge the people we work with,” senior researcher Yochanan Bigman, a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in a news release.“An employee may use AI to produce better work more efficiently yet still lose their manager's trust simply because AI was involved,” Bigman said. “Organizations need to recognize that adopting AI is not just a technological challenge — it is also a psychological and managerial one.”In the experiments, participants were tasked with supervising employees hired to create social media posts. Supervisors were informed whether the employees had used AI.The supervisors were given the option of either trusting employees to accurately report the amount of time they worked on their posts or asking for verification of their reported work time.Results showed that employees who completed the work themselves had a 68% chance of earning their supervisors’ trust, compared with just 24% for those who used AI.Additional experiments showed that lower trust was linked to poorer evaluations of employee performance, reduced perceptions of employees’ contributions to the organization, and lower perceived suitability for promotion.However, there were a couple of promising findings:AI use was viewed more favorably than if a person copied their work from another employee.The loss of trust was substantially reduced — but not eliminated — when organizations explicitly encouraged employees to use AI.Unless companies clearly support AI use to improve productivity, employees are likely to risk negative judgments from their bosses if they adopt the technology, researchers concluded.This could lead some employees to conceal their AI use, researchers said.“Organizations will need to invest in efforts that grapple with ‘shadow AI,’ ” researchers wrote in their paper.“As subordinates understand that their work speed and quality may improve due to (AI) use, but that their supervisors will trust them less and evaluate them negatively if they do so, they may continue to use (AI) but without disclosing their use,” the team wrote.Companies will be better off setting policies for AI use, especially if they plan to provide access to AI tools, researchers said. Managers also should be trained not to penalize the use of AI.“We find that setting no policy leads to similar trust penalties as when the use of these technologies is actively banned,” the team wrote. “However, by late 2025, most companies still did not have a dedicated AI policy. “It seems unlikely that all of these organizations do not want their employees to use (AI),” the researchers continued. “Yet, our findings indicate that their no-policy approach may diminish trust relationships within their workforce when workers actually do use such tools.”More informationHarvard Business Review has more on research about AI at work.SOURCES: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, news release, Nov. 4, 2026; The Leadership Quarterly, December 2026 .What This Means For YouManagers should reconsider how they look at employees’ use of AI, especially if such use is promoted by their company..Sign up for our weekly HealthDay newsletter

Using AI At Work Might Undermine The Boss' Trust In You, Study Warns

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