My colleague is not “human”: Will working with robots make you act more indifferently?

Abstract

Service warmth, defined as kindness, sincerity and helpfulness experienced by customers, is a critical component of service delivery. Using a combination of questionnaire surveys and roleplay experiments involving customers, employees, and their supervisors, this study investigated how employee service warmth changes when they work with service robots. The findings suggest that there is a decrease in service warmth among employees when they collaborate with service robots, as compared to when they collaborate with human colleagues. The reduced social interaction in robot-assisted collaboration contributes to increased emotional exhaustion among employees, leading to a decline in their service warmth. Notably, maintaining high-quality customer interactions helped alleviate employee emotional exhaustion from reduced social interaction with robot co-workers. This validates a relational approach emphasizing positive customer exchanges to replenish employee emotional reserves depleted by the impersonal nature of human-robot collaboration.