Leading With Care in the Age of AI: Transforming Educators’ AI-induced Envy into Employee-driven Innovation Through Paradoxical Leadership and an Inclusive Climate as Care-relevant Moderators

In the era of rapid AI integration in education, educators increasingly compare their performance, recognition, and career prospects with AI-proficient peers. Drawing on social comparison theory, we propose that positive attitudes toward AI heighten exposure to AI-relevant comparison cues, eliciting AI-induced envy that can impede collaboration or stimulate employee-driven innovation (EDI), depending on the surrounding context. We define ”leading with care” as an integrative contextual logic through which institutions and leaders recognize emotionally difficult comparison experiences while providing fairness, psychological safety, developmental support, and balanced expectations. In this study, leading with care is operationalized through two care-relevant boundary conditions: inclusive climate and paradoxical leadership. Using a three-wave survey with 4-week lags among 129 educators employed in the UAE, we test moderated mediation using PROCESS Model 14 with 5000 bootstrap samples. Results show that AI attitude positively predicts AI-induced envy and that the indirect effect of AI attitude on EDI through AI-induced envy is stronger when inclusive climate or paradoxical leadership is higher. The study reframes envy as a potentially constructive signal when educational institutions lead with care, offering implications for protecting educator well-being while sustaining innovation during AI-enabled change.