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With increased application of service robots in the hospitality industry, many employees nowadays are required to work with service robots. Existing studies mainly focused on the impact of service robots on customers, but ignored the existence of employee-service robot (ESR) interaction. This study explores the relationship between ESR co-work experience and psychological empowerment. Data were collected from 318 hospitality employees in China and PLS-SEM was employed for a causal-predictive analysis. Our results show that ESR co-work experience can not only improve employee trust toward service robots, but also affect trust toward organizations, and these two types of trust further affect psychological empowerment (i.e. goal internalization, authority and capability). Some of these relationships are significantly affected by gender, with the proposed impacts being stronger among male employees. The theoretical contributions and managerial implications of our paper for hospitality robotics and human resource management are subsequently discussed.
Liu et al. (Tue,) studied this question.