The Impact of Human-Robot Collaboration on Employees in the Workplace

Wang Zhenyuan; Yao Minghui

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20220512.301

Summary

Robots are more and more widely used in people’s work. Especially in the context of the upgrading of traditional industries, robots are further integrated with all walks of life, thus changing the traditional work scene and organization mode. Although the use of robots is in full swing, robots cannot completely replace human employees in practice. Human-robot collaboration will be an important work mode in the future. At the same time, as a technological change, robots should not only be seen as a technological challenge, and human factors also affect the organization to reap the benefits from the introduced technological change. Therefore, human-robot collaboration attracts extensive attention in academic and practical circles. Scholars have discussed employee responses under human-robot collaboration from the perspective of their respective fields, but there is still a lack of systematic combing and summary on the specific impact of human-robot collaboration on employees and its implementation mechanism. In view of this, this paper reviews the existing studies and constructs the research framework of the impact of human-robot collaboration on employees.

First, this paper compares the traditional human-robot interaction with current human-robot collaboration, integrates and enriches the concept and connotation of human-robot collaboration, and summarizes its core elements. Based on the existing literature, it reviews the development of human-robot interaction and the application trend of human-robot collaboration, integrates the existing definitions from different perspectives, clarifies the definition of human-robot collaboration, and summarizes its elements into three aspects: robot, collaborator, and environment. Second, starting from the three elements of human-robot collaboration, this paper systematically summarizes the psychological and behavioral responses of employees caused by human-robot collaboration. Existing studies mainly focus on the impact of the anthropomorphism and performance of robots on employees from the perspective of robots, and the results focus on sense of threat and trust at the psychological level as well as negative behavior at the behavioral level. Some studies began to pay attention to other influencing factors and results, such as the characteristics of employees, the placement of robots and the positive impact of human-robot collaboration. Third, this paper further sorts out and evaluates the theories involved in the existing research and discusses the application of these theories. Fourth, this paper constructs a research framework of the impact of human-robot collaboration on employees and discusses future research directions. Future research is prospected from four aspects: exploring the broader influencing factors and results of human-robot collaboration on employees; strengthening the research on the influence mechanism and focusing on the mediating and moderating mechanism of human-robot collaboration; improving the theoretical basis and developing measurement tools; and focusing on the impact of human-robot collaboration on leaders, enterprises and other subjects.

The main contributions are as follows: In theory, this paper integrates the concept of human-robot collaboration and enriches its connotative elements. Based on this, it systematically sorts out the existing literature, and summarizes employee responses caused by human-robot collaboration and theories involved in relevant research. It also puts forward future directions to promote the in-depth study of human-robot collaboration. In practice, by discussing the impact mechanism of human-robot collaboration, this paper helps enterprises to better understand the psychological and behavioral responses of employees, thus providing management implications for the implementation of human-robot collaboration in enterprises.