Dancing with service robots: The impacts of employee-robot collaboration on hotel employees’ job crafting

The increasing use of service robots, which serve as close working “partners” for hotel employees, accelerates the need to understand employees’ reactions in employee-robot collaboration. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of employees’ perceptions (i.e., perceived risk, perceived playfulness, performance expectancy, and effort expectancy) on job crafting toward employee-robot collaboration in hospitality. Drawing on the Sense-Think-Act framework, this study uses a structural equation model to analyze the multiple paths. By using paper- and pencil- surveys at three-time points, data were collected from 407 frontline employees working in 16 hotel chains in China and analyzed via AMOS and SPSS. The findings suggest that perceived risk and perceived playfulness are the key drivers of employees’ effort expectancy and performance expectancy, and perceived risk has the strongest positive impact on effort expectancy. Furthermore, performance expectancy and effort expectancy have a staged impact on job crafting. The findings are valuable to researchers and managers for future research and implementation of service robots in the hotel industry.