Equity by Design: A Positive Organizational Scholarship Approach to Human Resource‐Artificial Intelligence Systems Design

Abstract

In today's polarized sociopolitical climate, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts increasingly face backlash, with equity in particular becoming marginalized in both scholarly and practitioner discourse despite its central importance for ensuring fair allocation of opportunities and resources across the employee lifecycle. These concerns are magnified as human resource (HR) decisions become increasingly mediated by artificial intelligence (AI), which shifts the locus of equity from individual judgment to systems design. In this paper, we introduce the concept of HR‐AI systems design, defined as the intentional planning and configuration of AI tools that support core HR functions in ways that reflect and embed focal organizational values. More specifically, we focus on equitable HR‐AI systems design, which concerns the design of AI‐mediated HR systems in which equity considerations are embedded in their underlying logics, evaluative criteria, and decision processes. Drawing on positive organizational scholarship (POS), we develop a values‐based framework for equitable HR‐AI systems design grounded in three core elements: a strengths‐based orientation, justice as a virtuous value, and high‐quality connections as a relational principle. These POS‐informed design elements can redirect dominant merit‐based, optimization‐based, and homophily‐based biasing logics embedded in existing HR‐AI systems toward more equitable outcomes. This paper contributes to DEI scholarship by theorizing equity as a designable systems feature, advances research on AI in HR by identifying equity‐oriented design logics, and extends POS scholarship to digitally mediated organizational contexts.