Zooming in on the Impact of Collaborative Robot Arms in Manufacturing Workplaces

Collaborative robot arms (cobots) are gaining a strong foothold in contemporary manufacturing workplaces. While more information about the cobot’s impact becomes available, crucial design, work perception, performance, and strategic implications are systematically overlooked. Following a modern sociotechnical systems design theory (MSTS) perspective, which lies at the heart of workplace innovation literature, we studied if, how, and why the cobot made production units more resilient and strategically relevant. We ran a comparative case study involving 15 Dutch small- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) and 36 interviewees (managers and operators). The results describe how the cobots are designed as autonomous and rigid mini-robots, handling one or a few high-quantity products in ways that are not inherently more reliable and efficient. Operators interacting with the cobots experience stronger motivational work characteristics, butthe cobot’s autonomous and stable operation also provokes classic out-of-the-loop problems. Consequently, cobot-equipped production units do not always perform better. Nonetheless, SMEs deem their units strategically relevant since they (indirectly) improve financial flexibility, increase production capacity, streamlinefuture automation projects, and accommodate the resolution of labor scarcity issues. This research creates a pathway for more MSTS and workplace innovation research at the crossroads of human-robot interaction, organisational design, production management, applied psychology, and entrepreneurship. Practical implications are provided and discussed elaborately. Keywords: Modern sociotechnical systems, workplace innovation, collaborative robots, future ofwork, comparative case study, small- and medium-sized enterprises, industry 5.0