Offloading to Digital Minds: How Generative AI Can Help to Craft

In the era of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, white-collar
workers are given tremendous potential to simplify everyday tasks. Within vocational psychology, this phenomenon is known as job crafting. We conduct an
electroencephalography-based mixed-factorial experiment to explore the underlying mechanisms of how and why the use of generative AI tools can lead to job crafting. Relying on cognitive load theory and resource demand theory, we measure the effects of ChatGPT use and prompt engineering guidance in strategic
thinking tasks. We hypothesize that individuals who use ChatGPT without and
with prompting examples rely on cognitive offloading to avoid cognitive effort,
affecting resource demands. An initial evaluation of our experiment task design
provides promising results. We plan our experiment with participants who are
familiar with executive assistant tasks. Our expected results contribute to the ongoing discussion of ICT-enabled job crafting and provide empirical-driven explanations of AI-enabled job crafting mechanisms.