“My colleague is a robot” – exploring frontline employees' willingness to work with collaborative service robots

Abstract

PurposeAs service robots increasingly interact with customers at the service encounter, they will inevitably become an integral part of employee's work environment. This research investigates frontline employee's perceptions of collaborative service robots (CSR) and introduces a new framework, willingness to collaborate (WTC), to better understand employee–robot interactions in the workplace.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on appraisal theory, this study employed an exploratory research approach to investigate frontline employees' cognitive appraisal of service robots and their WTC with their nonhuman counterparts in service contexts. Data collection consisted of 36 qualitative problem-centered interviews. Following an iterative thematic analysis, the authors introduce a research framework of frontline employees' WTC with service robots.FindingsFirst, this study demonstrates that the interaction between frontline employees and service robots is a multistage appraisal process based on adoption-related perceptions. Second, it identifies important attributes across three categories (employee, robot and job attributes) that provide a foundation to understand the appraisal of CSRs. Third, it presents four employee personas (supporter, embracer, resister and saboteur) that provide a differentiated perspective of how service employee–robot collaboration may differ.Practical implicationsThe article identifies important factors that enable and restrict frontline service employees' (FSEs’) WTC with robots.Originality/valueThis is the first paper that investigates the appraisal of CSRs from the perspective of frontline employees. The research contributes to the limited research on human–robot collaboration and expands existing technology acceptance models that fall short to explain post-adoptive coping behavior of service employees in response to service robots in the workplace.

Frontline employee expectations on working with physical robots in retailing

“…The influence of robots on job characteristics can depend on robot type, individual differences between employees and contextual specificities (Belanche et al, 2020;Wirtz et al, 2018). The interviews that Paluch et al (2021) recently conducted with service FLEs on willingness to collaborate with robots, as well as those by Tuomi et al (2021a, b) in hospitality, both confirm the need to further investigate moderating variables when studying the appraisal of robots by employees.…”

“…, 2018). The interviews that Paluch et al. (2021) recently conducted with service FLEs on willingness to collaborate with robots, as well as those by Tuomi et al.…”

“…A third approach for further gap analysis could be to systematically confront our findings on retail FLE expectations with other recent (often exploratory) studies on actual experiences (e.g. Meyer et al, 2020;Paluch et al, 2021). Doing so would allow for an assessment of which expectations are confirmed or disconfirmed.…”

Can robots recover a service using interactional justice as employees do? A literature review-based assessment

“…Third, we compared FLEs directly to ServBots, assuming that ServBots would replace FLEs in the future. However, recent studies suggested that ServBots will work with FLEs rather than replace them (Paluch et al 2021 ). This approach considers the service triad—customers, service robots, frontline employees—as a more likely future of ServBots at the organizational frontline (Odekerken-Schroder et al 2021 ).…”

30 years of artificial intelligence (AI) research relating to the hospitality and tourism industry

“…willingness, was determined (Li et al, 2019;Paluch et al, 2021). In the post-pandemic era, the demands, strengths and weaknesses of AI were noticed, especially in the areas of service delivery and hygiene (Seyitoglu and Ivanov, 2020;Gaur et al, 2021).…”