Abstract

Organizations increasingly deploy artificial intelligence (AI) in human resource (HR) decision processes to improve efficiency and strategic execution, yet ethical failures persist when principles remain decoupled from everyday workflow enactment. This paper addresses AI-ethics in HR practice by advancing a behavior-first premise: AI-ethics becomes durable organizational practice only when ethical intent is translated into observable routines and cues that employees can interpret as legitimate and consistently enforced. We introduce the Socially Aware Framework for Ethical AI (SAFE-AI), which integrates normative ethical reasoning (consequentialist and deontological logics), social information processing, and socially informed heuristics as a practical translation layer for HR workflows. SAFE-AI specifies three stages of implementation—moving in (initiation), moving through (navigation), and moving out (culmination)—to guide scoping and constraints, feedback-driven interpretation management, and institutionalized accountability. Because enactment depends on the organizational cue environment, leadership behaviors (ethical intent-setting, resourcing, sensegiving transparency, and enforceable accountability) function as necessary conditions for sustained implementation beyond HR-local governance. We conclude with implications for practice and a testable agenda for research focused on implementation fidelity, cue-consistency mechanisms, and boundary conditions across organizational contexts.

Description

Copyright: © 2026 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Publisher

MDPI

Date of publication

Spring 2-9-2026

Language

english

Persistent identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10950/5077

Document Type

Article

Publisher Citation

Carpenter, R. E., Huyler, D., Patole, S. R., & McWhorter, R. (2026). Introducing SAFE-AI: A behavioral framework for managing ethical dilemmas in AI-driven human resource practices. Administrative Sciences, 16(2), 85. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci16020085

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