Abstract 

Many service industries face personnel shortages that will only worsen in the future. Socially engaging service robots can help solve these personnel shortages. In health and elderly care, robots are becoming indispensable helpers, for instance in assisted living, the fastest growing form of long-term care. However, robots cannot (yet) fully replace human service employees. Furthermore, robots encounter resistance from the side of both the human client and co-worker.

Given the complexity of real-world service environments, robots are unlikely to operate independently. Instead, human employees and robots must collaborate as interdependent team members. Bridging insights from marketing and organizational behavior, this research adopts a team-level perspective to examine how service teams successfully integrate robotic coworkers. Drawing on two field studies, we show that successful robot integration hinges on human teammates’ unilateral adaptation, recognition of robot’s unique capabilities, and robot anthropomorphizing. Positive consumer feedback creates a reinforcing loop strengthening team integration of a robotic newcomer.

Importantly, we demonstrate that a targeted intervention addressing these levers can increase robot usage in real-world settings by up to 20%. Together, these findings offer actionable insights for organizations seeking to move beyond adoption toward effective human–robot collaboration in frontline service teams.

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