In the coming decades, technological advancements will continue to increase automation in the workplace. The impact of automation on individual workers will be varied; in some cases, automation may harm (e.g., job loss), and in other cases benefit (e.g., enhanced performance) employees. We argue that employees’ anticipation of automation will shape their current work-related attitudes, such as their job engagement and turnover intentions, and thus their likelihood of manifesting these outcomes. We present two complementary studies, a survey (Study 1) and an experiment (Study 2), showing that employees have varying appraisals of the impact of automation on their well-being, both fearful (automation-related job insecurity), and optimistic (automation-related performance optimism). Across both studies, we found that automation-related job insecurity is detrimental to job attitudes, but that this effect is mitigated for people who feel a great deal of control at work. We also found that automation-related performance optimism is positively related to job engagement, and that this effect is stronger for people who feel a great deal of control at work – however we did not replicate these findings in the Study 2. The theoretical and practical implications of this research are discussed.