Working with robots: A job design perspective of hospitality employees’ collaboration intentions with service robots

Abstract

As teaming humans and robots becomes increasingly common in hospitality organizations, it is crucial to understand factors that facilitate and hinder human-robot collaborations. Building upon the Job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, this research examines how service robots' human likeness and job design factors affect hospitality employees’ perceptions and collaboration intentions. Data was collected from 488 hospitality employees through three experiment studies. The results show that employees feel more enjoyment and less stress when working with non-humanoid (vs. humanoid) robots, leading to higher collaboration intentions. Specifically, the adverse impact of robot-human likeness on employees' intention to collaborate is mitigated where task interdependence is high, and role clarification is better. The research findings offer hospitality organizations valuable insights into the types of robots that service employees are more likely to accept in collaborative work conditions. Furthermore, it suggests two job interventions to enhance collaborations between humans and robots.