In cobotic service teams, employees and robots collaborate to serve customers. As cobotic teams become more prevalent, a key question arises: How do consumers respond to cobotic teams, as a function of the roles shared by employees and robots (robots in superordinate roles as team leaders and humans in subordinate roles as assistants, or vice versa)? Six studies, conducted in different healthcare settings, show that consumers respond less favorably to robot-led (vs. human-led) teams. In delineating the process underlying these responses, the authors demonstrate that consumers ascribe less power to robot (vs. human) team leaders, which increases consumer anxiety and drives downstream responses through serial mediation. Further examining the power dynamics in cobotic service encounters, the authors identify boundary conditions that help mitigate negative consumer responses (increasing consumers’ power by letting them choose the robot in the service team, leveraging consumers’ power distance beliefs, and reinforcing the robot’s performance capabilities).

在协作机器人服务团队中，员工和机器人协作为客户提供服务。随着协作机器人团队变得越来越普遍，出现了一个关键问题：消费者如何响应协作机器人团队，根据员工和机器人共享的角色（机器人担任上级角色作为团队领导，人类担任下级角色作为助理，反之亦然） ）？在不同医疗保健环境中进行的六项研究表明，消费者对机器人领导（与人类领导）团队的反应较差。在描述这些反应背后的过程时，作者证明，消费者对机器人（与人类）团队领导者的权力较小，这增加了消费者的焦虑，并通过串行调解推动下游反应。作者进一步研究了协作机器人服务遭遇中的权力动态，确定了有助于减轻消费者负面反应的边界条件（通过让消费者选择服务团队中的机器人来增加消费者的权力，利用消费者的权力距离信念，并增强机器人的性能能力） ）。