Abstract
The deep integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into organizational settings has significantly transformed employees' work patterns, underscoring the need to investigate the mechanisms through which employee-AI collaboration influences creativity. Grounded in social cognitive theory, this study examines how employee-AI collaboration affects creativity via internal (self-efficacy) and external (performance pressure) mechanisms, and explores the moderating role of proactive behavior. Using convenience sampling, 733 valid responses were collected from six technology-driven enterprises. The theoretical model was tested through confirmatory factor analysis and regression analyses using AMOS and the Process macro for SPSS. Our results reveal that employee-AI collaboration is positively associated with creativity through two statistically supported indirect pathways: parallel indirect effects via self-efficacy (internal pathway) and performance pressure (external pathway), and a sequential indirect association in which higher self-efficacy is related to higher performance pressure, which in turn is positively related to creativity. Moreover, proactive behavior appears to moderate these relationships, such that the association between employee-AI collaboration and self-efficacy is more pronounced at higher levels of proactive behavior, whereas the association between employee-AI collaboration and performance pressure is less pronounced at higher levels of proactive behavior, yielding a pattern consistent with moderated indirect effects on creativity through both routes. These findings provide theoretical insights into the complex psychological processes underlying creativity in AI-enabled work environments and offer practical implications for optimizing AI applications and developing targeted interventions to foster employee creativity.