The influence of human-robot collaboration on perceived job duality and workplace well-being: Hotel employees’ perspectives

With the responsibilities of delivering customer service and creating moments of truth, hotel employees’ working lives are always difficult and now possibly have become more challenging because of the arrival of a service robot. To obtain an in-depth understanding of hotel employees’ perspectives on human-robot collaboration, this study applied a multi-theoretical lens and scrutinized how the robot product levels would influence employees’ perceived job duality and workplace well-being. By employing a scenario-based experimental design method and using a sample of 384 hotel receptionists, the results of this research disclose the significant roles of the three different robot product levels in influencing employees’ perceptions on social presence and job insecurity. Specifically, both core and tangible product levels offered by robots could significantly influence employees’ perceived social presence. While only the core product influenced employees’ perceived job insecurity, the tangible and extended products surprisingly manifested an interaction effect. Apart from these, this study also discloses the significant role of cognitive crafting in terms of mediating the relationship between perceived social presence/perceived job insecurity and cognitive well-being. In practice, what is found in this study provides research-based suggestions for the different stakeholders involved in human-robot collaboration and they are namely policymakers, hotel managers, frontline employees and robot designers & manufacturers.