Reconstructing Professional Identity: Management Educators in Generative AI-Augmented Learning Environment

Rather than asking whether Gen AI will replace aspects of the management educator’s role, this paper asks a more consequential question: How must management educators redefine their professional identity to remain pedagogically distinctive, ethically grounded, and meaningfully human in an AI-augmented business school? This theoretically grounded paper advances a novel conceptual framework and five propositions that provide a foundation for future empirical investigation. 

What This Paper Offers Readers:

•        A fresh perspective on the changing identity of management educators, moving beyond the question of how educators should use Gen AI to the deeper question of how Gen AI is reshaping who educators are and what distinctive value they bring.

•        A theory-informed explanation of faculty identity transformation — integrating Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Dialogical Self Theory (DST) to illuminate how Gen AI affects educators’ autonomy, competence, relatedness, and negotiation of multiple professional identities.

•        Insight into the emerging “hybrid educator” identity — showing how educators increasingly need to reconcile traditional roles as knowledge experts, case facilitators, mentors, and leadership developers with emerging roles as AI orchestrators, critical sense-makers, ethical stewards, and learning designers.

•        A critical examination of identity tensions in AI-augmented classrooms — including tensions between human expertise and AI capability, pedagogical autonomy and technological dependence, innovation and academic integrity, and efficiency and meaningful human engagement.

•        A shift from AI adoption to professional identity formation — arguing that successful Gen AI integration is not simply about acquiring technological skills; it requires educators to reconsider their professional purpose, pedagogical values, and distinctive human contribution.

•        Practical direction for faculty development — proposing that institutions move beyond conventional AI-skills training toward development initiatives that cultivate technological competence, reflective practice, ethical judgement, pedagogical agency, and adaptive professional identities.

Read the full paper via URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/10525629261483734

Source:

Rajaram, K. (2026). Reconstructing Professional Identity: Management Educators in Generative AI-Augmented Learning Environment. Journal of Management Education, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/10525629261483734