A conceptual paper of the mediating role of robotic trust between human task characteristics and employee job performance in hotel industry.

Delores H. T. LAU, Norman Au

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

It has been a long history of human issues in the hotel industry such as emotional labor, over-reliance on casual labor, discrepancy of job performance, unpleasant working condition, etc. that impact the outcome of the service. The introduction of service robots is expected to combat these human issues. Although the robotic solutions in hotel industry are yet limited to the minor tasks such as cleaning robots and delivery robots, it is estimated that over 375 million workers worldwide would be retrained for a new role as the automated labor would be progressively increased in coming. However, Henn-na Hotel (the world-first robotic hotel) has abandoned its robotic staff as they bungled the service operations. It creates doubts to the hoteliers of how possible service robots would dominate the future labor force. Therefore, effective deployment of robots becomes increasingly important to the managers who are to ensure robots would bring positive impact to the enhancement of the overall performance. Trust is an essential element in human-computer interaction, so as the human-robot interaction. It is suggested that an effective deployment of robots is subjected to the cognitive trust and affective trust level between the user and the robotic device. Cognitive trust plays a dominant role in the determination of trust. Yet, it has been argued that affect-based trust will take a more significant role in the overall perceived trust only if the users do not have sufficient knowledge of the systems. Given the task characteristics of hotel and industrial sector are different in nature, and the cognitive trust and affective trust towards robots could be varied according to the cognitive bias and equity theory.
This paper intends to fill the gap in understanding the mediating role of trust in human-robotic trusts in the hotel setting and its corresponding impact on the self-related improvement of job performance through the application of robots. It reviews the literature of trust in technology and robotic applications and investigates the difference between cognitive and affective trust on service robots and their corresponding impact on the employees’ self-related improvement in job performance. It will also discuss the potential attributes that influence the level of trust in service robots according to the task characteristics of the hotel industry. It highlights the relationship between task characteristics and trusting belief and its impact on the intended purpose of the robotic application. It will provide practical contributions to the hoteliers such as providing recommendations on an effective deployment of service robots by considering the human task characteristics and taking consideration of the employees’ affective trusting beliefs towards robotic applications. For the academic contribution, this paper will develop a task-based employee-robot trust theoretical framework and suggest the potential attributes of its measurement scale.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe 19th Asia Pacific Forum for Graduate Students Research in Tourism Conference Proceedings
Pages20
Number of pages1
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2023
EventThe 19th Asia Pacific Forum for Graduate Students Research in Tourism - Duy Tan University, Da Nang, Viet Nam
Duration: 30 Jun 20232 Jul 2023

Conference

ConferenceThe 19th Asia Pacific Forum for Graduate Students Research in Tourism
Country/TerritoryViet Nam
CityDa Nang
Period30/06/232/07/23

Keywords

  • Hotel robots, human-robotic trust, cognitive trust in robots, affective trust in robots

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