Psychological Mechanisms of Workplace Change: Trust, Fairness, and Well-Being Under AI-Enabled HR and Organizational Redesign

Trust, fairness, psychological safety, perceived organizational support, and identification are the mechanisms through which employees experience change at work. Yet most of what we know about them comes from studies framed around organizational triggers, such as AI-enabled HR systems, sustainability-driven redesign, and restructuring, rather than around the mechanisms themselves. That framing has produced rich description of what firms are changing, but comparatively little theory-driven, mechanism-level evidence of how these psychological states form, interact, and translate into well-being and performance, or of why an apparently useful change can just as easily produce strain or resistance. Because these mechanisms operate across almost any organizational context, findings about them are often scattered across separate literatures on hiring, appraisal, redesign, and change management, each treated as its own topic rather than as instances of the same underlying psychology.This Research Topic puts the mechanisms first. It invites work that isolates and tests how trust, fairness perceptions, psychological safety, perceived organizational support, and identification are formed, maintained, or eroded, and how they in turn shape employee cognition, emotion, and performance. Contemporary developments, including algorithmic hiring, performance monitoring, automated appraisal, sustainability-driven role redesign, hybrid and remote arrangements, demographic shifts, and restructuring, are welcome as settings in which to test these mechanisms, but the contribution should be to the mechanism, not a descriptive account of the setting. Comparative or boundary-testing designs that examine a mechanism across more than one such setting are especially encouraged, as are studies that show a mechanism behaving differently than expected, for example a change that improves efficiency but erodes fairness perceptions, or one that increases workload strain despite good intentions.This Research Topic particularly welcomes intervention research aimed at individuals and teams, such as leadership development, voice and feedback mechanisms, job redesign, and support practices, evaluated through pre-post or controlled designs that isolate the mechanism at work, along with studies reporting null results, boundary conditions, and unintended consequences.This Research Topic welcomes empirical, methodological, and theoretical research grounded in organizational psychology, focused on individual and team-level psychological experience. Relevant themes include, but are not limited to:• How trust, fairness perceptions, and psychological safety form and change under algorithmic hiring, monitoring, and appraisal;• The role of perceived organizational support and identification in sustaining motivation through role redesign;• Trust and voice as mechanisms in the leader-follower relationship during change;• Emotional and cognitive responses that mediate or moderate reactions to restructuring and other workplace change;• Cross-cultural variation in how these mechanisms operate.This Topic particularly encourages experimental, quasi-experimental, diary, and longitudinal intervention studies that test specific mechanisms, as well as registered reports and replications. This Research Topic does not cover organizational-level strategy, talent management systems, or governance frameworks; contributions should center on the psychological mechanism itself rather than on the organizational trigger or adaptation. Appropriate article types include Original Research, Brief Research Reports, Systematic Reviews, and Registered Reports. Topic editors: Vuk Mirčetić, Marko Slavkovic, Ivana Kovačević, Marko Mihic Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85139/psychological-mechanisms-of-workplace-change-trust-fairness-and-well-being-under-ai-enabled-hr-and-organizational-redesign