Employee Perceptions of AI Ethics and Moral Accountability in Saudi Arabian Organisations: A Qualitative Study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51325/d4w0yq25Keywords:
AI Ethics, Employee Attitudes, Qualitative Research, Saudi Arabia, Algorithmic Accountability, Thematic AnalysisAbstract
The rapid deployment of artificial intelligence in organisational decision-making has generated urgent questions about how employees experience, interpret, and morally evaluate AI systems that shape their working lives — from performance monitoring and task allocation to promotion decisions and disciplinary processes. Yet the employee perspective on AI ethics remains substantially underexplored, particularly in non-Western institutional contexts where distinct cultural, religious, and organisational norms may produce different moral frameworks for evaluating algorithmic authority. This paper reports findings from an interpretive qualitative study based on 38 in-depth semi-structured interviews with employees, middle managers, and HR professionals across nine Saudi Arabian organisations that have deployed AI systems in workforce management or operational decision-making. Using reflexive thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke's (2022) methodology, we identify five master themes that structure employee moral experience of AI in the Saudi workplace: (1) Algorithmic opacity and the collapse of moral dialogue; (2) Displaced accountability and the erosion of relational trust; (3) Religious and cultural frames for evaluating algorithmic authority; (4) Collective versus individual moral responses to AI-driven harm; and (5) Resignation, resistance, and the ethics of algorithmic coping. The study makes three theoretical contributions: it develops the concept of relational accountability as a culturally grounded alternative to procedural accountability in AI ethics; it shows how Islamic ethical frameworks, particularly concepts of 'adl (justice), amanah (trustworthiness), and shura (consultation), provide Saudi employees with a distinctive moral vocabulary for evaluating AI systems; and it argues that the dominant discourse of individual data rights is poorly calibrated to the collective moral sensibilities that characterise Saudi Arabian and broader GCC organisational cultures.
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