Abstract

Despite strong organizational interest in leveraging highly skilled immigrants’(HSIs) expertise, post-hire workplace integration practices remain largely standardized and fail to accommodate situated, tacit, and psychological micro-dynamics of the integration process. Existing research has generated rich explanatory accounts of integration determinants, yet offers limited guidance on how HSI workplace integration (HSIWI) could be redesigned or how such insights can be translated into actionable system designs. To address this gap, this study develops a design theory that specifies how AI can be designed to mediate promoter–adopter dynamics and support effective HSIWI. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory, Self-Efficacy Theory, organizational socialization research, and Dynamic Capabilities Theory—bridged through Affordance–Actualization Theory—we conceptualize AI as a constitutive element in integration routines. Using design science research, we derive eight high-level affordances and translate them into eight meta-requirements, thirteen meta-design principles, and eight testable design-product hypotheses. We instantiate the theory in IntegrateHub, a governed multi-agent AI prototype with hybrid orchestration and validation layers, and evaluate design-product validity ex ante through scenario-based analytical walkthroughs (HSI, line manager, and HR professional). Findings produce a traceable design blueprint for governed personalization, specifying how contextual knowledge access, autonomy-preserving guidance, ethical sensing, and adaptive resource curation can be systematically realized in practice. The study advances management and IS research by reframing HSIWI as a design challenge and by bridging explanatory social theories with prescriptive system design, fostering dialogue between hard computational logic and soft human processes in AI-enabled integration.

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