It’s the robot’s fault: how does the anthropomorphism of service robots impact employee engagement in service recovery?

This paper explores how the anthropomorphic features of service robots influence employee service recovery engagement through the mechanism of responsibility diffusion in service failure contexts, with a particular focus on the moderating role of organizational AI readiness. Grounded in the Computers As Social Actors paradigm, we validated our hypotheses across five studies (N = 1532). This progression included a real-world pre-study, an organizational survey, and two controlled experiments featuring both embodied and virtual robotics. A final video-based experiment was conducted to systematically eliminate alternative accounts, including role ambiguity. The results show that service robot anthropomorphism increases the diffusion of responsibility among collaborating employees, which in turn reduces their subsequent service recovery engagement. However, a high degree of organizational AI readiness can buffer this negative effect. Our study advances the scholarship on human-robot collaboration, offering managers actionable guidance for integrating service robots to boost employee productivity.