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Introduction
The emergent use of artificial intelligence (AI) in human resource management (HRM) amounts to iterative interactions between humans and machines based on synthetic intelligence. The resultant decision-making has the potential to re-invigorate and reengineer the ecosystem and the landscape in which HRM is practised (Leicht-Deobald et al., 2019; Malik et al., 2020; Raisch and Krakowski, 2021; Vrontis et al., 2021). The increased reliance on AI has arguably added new set of role demands, professional challenges and management expectations for organisations and HRM professionals, necessitating critical analysis of these challenges' ethical implications (Leikas et al., 2019). Despite the great opportunities presented by the implementation of AI applications in functions of HRM, yet at the same time, many challenges and risks are associated with implementing AI in HRM, constituting a darker side of AI (Arslan et al., 2021; Du and Xie, 2021; Meske et al., 2021; Wirtz et al., 2020). The flip side of using advanced applications of AI in HRM may enhance challenges varying from issues of data privacy, security, ethical/moral judgement and decision makings, goal alignment between AI and human beings, as well as ethical problems related to agency and fairness of AI (Du and Xie, 2021; Kumar et al., 2020; Southey, 2016; Wirtz et al., 2020). In addition to these, more recent research has also observed that the use of AI applications may cause technostress among HR managers as well as due to their naivety and unfamiliarity with such applications, there are chances of mistreatment of employees as well as customer data (Chatterjee et al., 2021).
These challenges are even more significant and urgent due to the exponential growth and ubiquitous impact of AI technologies in different functions of HRM during the recent Covid-19 situation. The mentioned exemplary risks and the tendency of more reliance on AI applications in HRM in the next normal highlight the need for a multi-stakeholder ethical framework for AI-augmented HRM. AI-augmented HRM can be defined as the capacity of the HRM function to integrate with existing information systems and utilise latest AI applications and technologies to ingest, process and analyse data to aid problem-solving and decision-making for positive HRM domain-specific operational, relational and transformational consequences (Prikshat et al