---
id: "concept-maladaptive-coping"
type: "concept"
source_timestamps: ["§ Watch."]
tags: ["psychology", "management", "resistance"]
related: ["concept-shadow-ai", "claim-active-sabotage", "framework-aware", "action-monitor-coping", "contrarian-active-sabotage"]
definition: "Negative behavioral responses to AI-induced psychological threats, including task avoidance, psychological withdrawal, disengagement, and active sabotage."
sources: ["adoption"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-adoption"
originDay: 9
articleStem: "hbr-sig-52-genai-threatening-to-workers"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2026/03/why-gen-ai-feels-so-threatening-to-workers"
sourceTitle: "Why Gen AI Feels So Threatening to Workers"
---
# Maladaptive Coping Behaviors

When workers face Gen-AI-related threats to their competence, autonomy, or relatedness (the [[concept-psychological-needs-triad]]), they often resort to **maladaptive coping strategies**: task avoidance, psychological withdrawal, disengagement, and outright sabotage.

A concrete example: a team member who consistently declines Gen-AI-related assignments may be **'dissociating'** — psychologically withdrawing or reducing their identification with domains where they feel their competence is threatened.

Leaders must actively monitor for these signs (e.g., using adoption metrics like **GitHub Copilot** usage tracking) so they can intervene constructively — the Watch step of [[framework-aware]], operationalized in [[action-monitor-coping]]. [[concept-shadow-ai]] is one especially common maladaptive form.

Left unaddressed, these underlying difficulties and stress can escalate into **active resistance**: **31%** of U.S. knowledge workers admit to actively working against their company's AI initiatives (see [[claim-active-sabotage]] and [[contrarian-active-sabotage]]).

**Enrichment note:** Framing these behaviors as maladaptive coping is consistent with occupational-stress and organizational-psychology literature (workers withdraw or resist when threatened), but the clean causal chain 'AI threatens needs → shadow AI → sabotage' is interpretive and not yet rigorously tested in longitudinal studies — read it as a research-informed lens, not proven cause.


## Related across articles
- [[concept-fobo]]
- [[concept-shadow-ai]]