Shielding frontline service employees from customer incivility: The roles of service robot support and knowledge

초록

Research background:Progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics is reshaping the service landscape and driving technological innovation. Service robots are increasingly introduced to improve performance and support frontline employees in mitigating emotional and physical strains. However, evidence remains limited on whether service robots truly protect employees from stressors such as customer incivility. Drawing on the conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study addresses this gap by conceptualizing service robots as context-dependent technological resources and examines how their efficacy depends on organizational support and employee knowledge in robot-enabled environments. Purpose of the article: This study examined how customer incivility depletes frontline employees’ resources and when these adverse effects can be mitigated in human–robot contexts. We assessed the mediating role of work engagement between customer incivility and in-role service performance and customer-helping behavior, and the moderating effects of service robot support and robot knowledge. Methods: We collected data from 200 frontline employees in South Korea, a region with rapid service robot integration. We utilized a two-wave survey design with a two-month interval to minimize common method variance. Hypotheses were tested via path analysis in Mplus using bootstrapping (N = 5,000). Findings & value added: Work engagement mediated the negative relationships between customer incivility and both in-role service performance and customer-helping behavior. We observed a significant three-way interaction among customer incivility, service robot support, and service robot knowledge on work engagement. When both service robot support and robot knowledge were high, the negative effects of customer incivility on work engagement and indirect outcomes were weakest. This study advances research on technology-enabled work by demonstrating that service robots function as context-dependent technological re-sources. Our findings highlight the importance of robot support and employee robot-related knowledge in buffering resource depletion and enhancing resilience in robot-enabled environments.

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