When AI Meets the Backstage: How Artificial Intelligence Is Accelerating the Formation of Workplace Microcultures — and What It Means for Safe Work Australia’s Research Priorities

Dr Anna Kiaos  |  Mind Culture Life Australia  |  February 2026

In June 2025, Safe Work Australia released its Research and Evaluation Strategy, setting out five priority focus areas to guide national research efforts in work health and safety and workers’ compensation. Two of those priorities are particularly significant when considered together: psychosocial harm prevention and recovery, and advances in technology including AI, automation and automated machines.

The strategy asks a critical question: how might technological advances give rise to new WHS risks? It also calls for an expanded evidence base around effective systemic controls to reduce psychosocial harm in workplaces. These are the right questions. But the current research landscape is largely answering them in parallel — studying psychosocial risk in one stream and AI adoption in another — when the most dangerous developments are happening at their intersection.

This article argues that AI adoption is creating the precise cultural conditions that produce workplace microcultures — small, discreet groups that form beneath the surface of an organisation in response to sustained cultural pressure. These microcultures are where psychosocial risk is accumulating invisibly, beyond the reach of standard measurement tools, and they represent a significant gap in the evidence base that Safe Work Australia’s strategy is seeking to build.

Safe Work Australia’s Research Priorities: The Missing Connection

The Research and Evaluation Strategy identifies five focus areas: shifting mindsets around WHS fundamentals, psychosocial harm prevention and recovery, advances in technology, the changing nature of work, and the effectiveness of systems and frameworks. Additionally, the Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy 2023–2033 explicitly acknowledges that while automation can reduce physical hazards, workers overseeing new technology could be exposed to more psychosocial hazards resulting from increased or more complex interpersonal interactions.

This is an important recognition. But it understates the depth of the problem. The psychosocial hazards created by AI adoption are not limited to interpersonal interactions. They extend to threats to professional identity, erosion of psychological safety, cultural fragmentation between leadership and staff, and the formation of microcultures that operate outside the visibility of any existing measurement or governance framework.

The strategy also calls for research into emerging or evolving issues, including optimising synergy between WHS, organisational development and HR. This is precisely where cultural diagnostics — and the study of microcultures in particular — can contribute to the evidence base in a way that traditional epidemiological and survey-based methods cannot.

Safe Work Australia’s strategy asks how AI might give rise to new WHS risks. The answer is not only in the technology itself — it is in what happens to the culture of the organisation that adopts it.

What Are Microcultures and Why Should the WHS Community Care?

In my published research on Machinery of Government restructures in the Australian public sector, I identified a cultural phenomenon that most organisational leaders and WHS professionals do not know exists. When employees experience sustained cultural disruption — when the way things have always been done is overridden by a new structure, ideology or set of expectations — they do not simply comply or leave. They form microcultures.

Microcultures are not subcultures. Subcultures are relatively visible and often recognised by the organisation. Microcultures are deliberately invisible. They form beneath the surface as protective mechanisms for employees who feel the official culture no longer represents their reality. They develop their own language, norms and informal rules, and they are designed to be undetectable by leadership, HR and standard engagement tools.

In the government agency I studied, microcultures emerged when employees from the original organisation found themselves culturally misaligned with the new merged entity. On the frontstage, they looked compliant. Backstage, they were operating in a parallel culture — avoiding the new leadership, creating informal workarounds and quietly maintaining their pre-merger ways of working.

This research, published in the Australian Journal of Public Administration, demonstrated that microcultures are both a symptom of poorly managed cultural change and a site where psychosocial risk concentrates. They are where cynicism deepens, disengagement normalises and psychological harm accumulates — all beyond the reach of conventional measurement.

AI Adoption Is Creating the Perfect Conditions for Microculture Formation

Everything I have observed about how microcultures form during organisational disruption is now being replicated — and in many cases intensified — by AI adoption. This is directly relevant to Safe Work Australia’s priority focus on advances in technology and their WHS implications.

Identity threat is the catalyst. When AI is introduced into a workplace, it does not affect everyone equally. For employees whose professional identity is built on expertise, judgment and institutional knowledge — senior policy officers, experienced clinicians, compliance specialists, skilled analysts — AI represents a direct challenge to what makes them valuable. Organisational psychology research shows that identity threats produce predictable defensive responses: withdrawal, cynicism, resistance and disengagement. These are not signs of stubbornness. They are psychologically predictable consequences of poorly managed change — and they are psychosocial hazards that organisations have a duty to identify and manage.

Frontstage compliance masks backstage harm. My research on normative control has shown that when employees feel pressure to align with an organisational ideology they do not believe in, they perform compliance rather than genuinely adopting the change. They use the AI tools when visible, attend the workshops, adopt the language — and privately form alliances with colleagues who share their anxiety. This is directly relevant to Safe Work Australia’s focus on shifting mindsets around WHS fundamentals: if workers are performing compliance rather than experiencing genuine adoption, then the psychosocial hazard is not being managed — it is being concealed.

Digital work environments expand the backstage. Safe Work Australia’s strategy acknowledges the changing nature of work, including remote work and non-traditional employment. These arrangements dramatically expand the spaces in which microcultures can form and consolidate. Private messaging channels, informal video calls and offline conversations create a backstage that is larger and less visible than ever before. Leadership has less insight into the informal cultural dynamics of their organisation precisely when those dynamics are becoming more consequential for psychosocial risk.

AI adoption does not create a single, uniform change. It fractures the cultural landscape of an organisation into visible compliance and invisible resistance — and the psychosocial harm concentrates in the invisible layer.

The Evidence Gap: Why Standard Tools Miss This

Safe Work Australia’s strategy emphasises the importance of building a robust evidence base and ensuring research has practical national value. This is essential. But there is a methodological gap that needs to be addressed: the dominant approaches to measuring psychosocial risk in Australian workplaces — surveys, pulse checks, claims data and compliance audits — are designed to measure what is visible. Microcultures exist precisely because they are not.

Engagement surveys capture the frontstage. They tell you what employees are willing to report through official channels. They do not access the backstage conversations, the informal norms, the shifting language and the collective meaning-making that define a microculture. Workers’ compensation claims data captures outcomes — the point at which harm has already occurred and been reported. It does not capture the cultural mechanisms that produced the harm.

This is where organisational ethnography offers a contribution that quantitative methods cannot. Ethnographic research — immersive, observational, qualitative inquiry into how work is actually experienced inside an organisation — is specifically designed to access what standard tools miss. It can identify microcultures, document the cultural pressure that produces them and provide the diagnostic evidence that organisations need to intervene before harm escalates into injury and claims.

The Research and Evaluation Strategy’s call for research into emerging or evolving issues, including the intersection of WHS with organisational development and HR, creates an opportunity to incorporate ethnographic and cultural diagnostic methodologies into the national evidence base. This would strengthen the ability of regulators, PCBUs and practitioners to identify and manage psychosocial hazards that are currently invisible to existing frameworks.

Implications for Policy and Practice

For regulators and policy makers: The intersection of AI adoption and psychosocial risk requires research methodologies that can access the informal, invisible layers of organisational culture. Safe Work Australia’s Research and Evaluation Strategy should consider ethnographic and qualitative approaches as complementary evidence sources alongside quantitative data. The strategy’s emphasis on collaboration with the research ecosystem creates an opportunity to bring organisational culture researchers into the WHS conversation in a way that has not historically occurred.

For PCBUs and senior leaders: If your organisation is adopting AI and your engagement scores look stable, that does not mean your psychosocial risk is managed. It may mean your employees are performing compliance on the frontstage while the real impact is accumulating backstage — in microcultures you cannot see. Your due diligence obligation under the WHS Act requires you to understand the actual conditions of work, not just the reported ones. Cultural diagnostics that go beyond surveys are not a luxury — they are an essential part of meeting that obligation during periods of significant technological change.

For WHS and HR practitioners: Pay attention to the signals that indicate microcultures are forming: increased cynicism in informal conversations, ‘us versus them’ language, informal workarounds, experienced staff quietly disengaging, and a gap between what leadership announces and what staff actually experience. These are early indicators of cultural fragmentation and emerging psychosocial risk. They will not appear in your survey data. They require structured observation, candid conversations and access to the backstage.

For researchers: Safe Work Australia’s inaugural Research Summit in September 2025 explored how to design and deliver research that supports safe and healthy work. The sharp rise in psychological injury claims noted in Safe Work Australia’s Evidence Matters publication, combined with the strategy’s focus on technology-driven hazards, creates a compelling case for research that examines how AI adoption is producing psychosocial harm through cultural mechanisms — not just through workload, surveillance or job insecurity, but through the deeper disruption to identity, meaning and belonging that defines the lived experience of organisational change.

Connecting the Dots

Safe Work Australia’s Research and Evaluation Strategy represents an important step toward building the evidence base Australia needs to manage the psychosocial hazards of the future. Its recognition that technology and psychosocial risk are intersecting challenges is exactly right. The next step is to examine the cultural mechanism that connects them.

Microcultures are that mechanism. They form when cultural pressure exceeds what employees can absorb through official channels. They concentrate psychosocial risk in spaces that standard measurement tools cannot reach. And AI adoption — with its threat to professional identity, its erosion of psychological safety and its acceleration of cultural fragmentation — is creating the conditions for microculture formation at scale across Australian workplaces.

The organisations that will navigate this successfully are not the ones with the best technology strategy. They are the ones that have the courage to look beyond the frontstage, into the lived experience of their workforce, and address what they find there before it becomes a crisis, a claim or a headline.

Our minds shape the cultures we create, and the cultures we create define the lives we live.

Dr Anna Kiaos is the founder of Mind Culture Life Australia and a researcher at the University of New South Wales, Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health. Her published research examines how organisational culture shapes psychological wellbeing, with a focus on psychosocial risk, normative control, microcultures and cultural pressure. She works with government agencies, healthcare organisations and private enterprise across Australia.

Selected publications referenced in this article:

Kiaos, T.A. (2023). Examining organisational subcultures: Machinery of Government mergers and emerging organisational microcultures. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8500.12590

Kiaos, T.A. (2025). Organizational culture and faking authenticity: How employees act on the front stage under pressures of normative control. Organizational Cultures: An International Journal, 25(2), 41–63. https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-8013/CGP/v25i02/41-63