Robots Make Humans Shine: Working Alongside Robots Enhances Support of Human Employees
(A2026-133895)

AUTHORS

Feng Yang, University of Groningen; Jenny van Doorn, University of Groningen; Jiangnan (Johnny) Yu, London Business School/London Business School

ABSTRACT

Robots are becoming increasingly integrated into the human workforce, leading to the rise of human-robot teams as a new form of workplace collaboration. Although existing literature has begun exploring how consumers react to robots in such settings, insights on how consumers perceive and react to a human employee working with a robot are scarce and conflicting. Across three studies, including a field experiment with an embodied robot, we find that consumers attribute greater humanness to a human employee working alongside a robot compared to one working alongside another human, which in turn strengthens ingroup categorization. This sequential process ultimately drives more favorable consumer responses: consumers are more likely to support the employee in terms of responding positively to their requests for help and feel less dissatisfied after a service failure. However, this benefit disappears when the failure is perceived as controllable (vs. incontrollable) by the employee.