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<p>Despite the growing prevalence of robot deployment in service industries, the current robotic technology still occasionally falls short of meeting customer demands, resulting in inevitable service failures at the frontline. However, little research focuses on human employees’ responses to robot service failures from a colleague’s perspective. In this article, we draw on social comparison theory to explore how human employees perceive and respond to robot service failures. Across a time-lagged critical incident-based survey (Study 1: <i>N</i> = 173) and a scenario-based experiment (Study 2: <i>N</i> = 308), we found that when human employees feel threatened by service robots, service robot failures increase their state self-esteem, which in turn enhances employees’ customer-directed citizenship behavior. By shifting the focus from organizational outsiders to insiders, this research not only unravels the mechanism and boundary condition underlying how human employees perceive and respond to service failures of their robot colleagues, but also highlights the importance of considering downward social comparison processes within human-robot social comparison dynamics.</p>

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Seeing opportunities from threats: How human employees respond to robot service failures from a social comparison perspective

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年1月3日

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  • Yuming Wang,
  • Jinlian Luo,
  • Xiaoyu Christina Wang

摘要

Despite the growing prevalence of robot deployment in service industries, the current robotic technology still occasionally falls short of meeting customer demands, resulting in inevitable service failures at the frontline. However, little research focuses on human employees’ responses to robot service failures from a colleague’s perspective. In this article, we draw on social comparison theory to explore how human employees perceive and respond to robot service failures. Across a time-lagged critical incident-based survey (Study 1: N = 173) and a scenario-based experiment (Study 2: N = 308), we found that when human employees feel threatened by service robots, service robot failures increase their state self-esteem, which in turn enhances employees’ customer-directed citizenship behavior. By shifting the focus from organizational outsiders to insiders, this research not only unravels the mechanism and boundary condition underlying how human employees perceive and respond to service failures of their robot colleagues, but also highlights the importance of considering downward social comparison processes within human-robot social comparison dynamics.