Jenny van Doorn - On campus - Room T004

Marketing Research Seminar

Speaker: 
Jenny van Doorn
Professor of Service Marketing - University of Groningen, the Netherlands

Title: Frightful or fantastic? Acceptance of robot interactions in service teams

Abstract: As many service industries face personnel shortages that will only worsen in the future, social robots are seen as indispensable helpers that can help solve these shortages. However, the complexity of real-world service environments is such that robots cannot (yet) fully replace human service employees. Instead, human employees and robots must collaborate as interdependent team members.

Bridging insights from marketing, organizational behavior, and management, we adopt a team perspective to examine how service teams (un)successfully integrate robotic coworkers. Drawing on two field studies, we show that successful robot integration hinges on human teammates’ adaptation to the robot newcomer, recognition of robot’s unique capabilities, and robot anthropomorphizing. Positive client feedback and managers stimulating staff exploration creates a reinforcing loop strengthening team integration of a robot newcomer. Importantly, we demonstrate that a targeted intervention addressing these levers can increase robot usage in real-world settings by up to 27%. Together, these findings offer actionable insights for organizations seeking to move beyond adoption toward effective human–robot collaboration in frontline service teams.