When customers mistreat service robots: employee moral appraisals and managerial intervention

Purpose As service robots become embedded in frontline operations, employees increasingly witness customers directing rude or degrading behaviors toward service robots. Although robots are nonsentient technologies, such incidents can violate service interaction norms and disrupt the moral order of robot-augmented encounters. This study aims to examine how observed robot-directed customer mistreatment shapes employees’ moral appraisals, cognitive processing and service behaviors. Design/methodology/approach Across a multistudy research program, Study 1a uses a randomized experiment to test whether observing robot-directed customer mistreatment elicits vicarious moral emotions and deontic injustice perceptions and whether immediate managerial intervention modestly attenuates deontic injustice perceptions. Study 1b uses a construct-boundary experiment comparing robot-directed mistreatment, human-directed mistreatment and respectful customer interaction. Study 2 uses a 10-day experience-sampling design to examine within-person spillover from daily observed robot-directed customer mistreatment to evening cognition and next-workday service behavior. Study 3 uses a field quasi-experiment to assess a structured managerial intervention protocol. Findings Observed robot-directed customer mistreatment increases deontic injustice perceptions; in the daily study, these perceptions are associated with evening affective rumination and limited next-workday service withdrawal. A smaller constructive pathway links problem-solving pondering to proactive service behavior. Immediate managerial intervention modestly attenuates justice-based appraisal; in a nonrandomized field comparison, a formal intervention protocol is associated with modest improvements in proactive service behavior and withdrawal. Originality/value By using a nonsentient service robot as a boundary case, this research shows that witnessed mistreatment can remain normatively consequential even when victim-centered empathic concern is attenuated. The findings distinguish conduct-centered deontic appraisal from concern for a suffering victim and conceptualize managerial intervention as a potential form of normative repair in robot-augmented service systems.