When AI Challenges the Manager: From Technostress and Identity Threat to Leadership Resilience in Design Management

As AI increasingly handles managerial tasks, it undermines some design managers while encouraging others. To explain this divergence, we surveyed 556 Chinese design managers, linking five technostress dimensions to professional identity threat, adaptive learning, and leadership effectiveness. Results show that all technostress dimensions—especially technological invasion and overload—heighten professional identity threat. However, this threat positively drives adaptive learning, which strongly enhances leadership effectiveness. Perceived organizational support and growth mindset strengthen this threat-to-learning conversion, whereas general self-efficacy does not. Machine learning confirmed adaptive learning as the strongest predictor of effectiveness. Ultimately, this study shifts the focus from initial AI adoption to reconstructing human leadership as AI becomes routine, highlighting system explanation, support visibility, learning scaffolds, and boundary-preserving workflows as critical system-design levers.