Human-Robot Teams – Paving the Way for the Teams of the Future

Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, robots, and especially social robots that can naturally interact with humans, are now found in more and more areas of our lives. At the same time, teams have been the norm in organizations for decades. To bring these two circumstances together, this dissertation addresses the use of social robots together with humans in teams, so-called human-robot teams (HRTs). This work aims to advance knowledge about HRTs and important underlying mechanisms in the establishment of such teams, thereby providing insights in two aspects. First, a structured and universal definition of HRTs is derived from the various perspectives of extant research, and based on a comprehensive literature overview, important characteristics and influencing factors of HRTs as well as research gaps in HRT research are identified. Second, insights into the underlying mechanisms of the establishment of human-robot teams are provided for settings with social robots in two different team roles: team assistant and lower-level (team) manager. For this purpose, this dissertation contains three research studies that cover the currently largely unexplored area of social robots' use in organizational teams at both the employee and lower-level manager levels. The first study (conceptual study) provides a foundation for this dissertation and beyond by developing a structured and universal definition of HRTs. It also structures extant research on HRTs and proposes an agenda for future research on HRTs based on research gaps identified in a comprehensive literature review that includes 194 studies on HRTs. The second and third studies (empirical studies 1 and 2) use empirical online studies to address two of the research gaps identified in the conceptual study. They examine the underlying mechanisms in decisions for social robots in two different team roles: team assistant (empirical study 1) and team manager (empirical study 2). By looking at expectations and experiences of taskwork-/performance-related and teamwork-related/relational features of social robots using polynomial regressions and response surface analyses, these studies rely on expectation disconfirmation theory to provide a detailed investigation of the underlying mechanisms of organizational decisions for social robots. Empirical study 1 thereby shows that for teamwork, positive disconfirmation and high levels of experiences lead to higher acceptance of humanoid and android robotic team assistants, and similar results emerge for a humanoid robot’s taskwork skills. In contrast, for taskwork skills of android team assistants, high levels of positive disconfirmation lead to lower robot acceptance. For robotic lower-level managers, empirical study 2 shows that there are discrepancies in the evaluation of performance-related usefulness and relational attitude. While for usefulness a slight overfulfilment of expectations leads to a positive impact on the readiness to work with, before evaluations decrease with greater overfulfillment, for attitude increasing positive experiences are associated with (decreasing) positive evaluations of readiness. In summary, this dissertation contributes to scientific research on HRTs by advancing the understanding of HRTs, providing a structured and universal definition of HRTs, and suggesting avenues for future research. The systematic investigation of underlying mechanisms for the selection of different types of social robots for different team roles provides a holistic view of this new form of organizational teams. In addition to the research contributions, this thesis also provides practical guidance for the successful establishment of HRTs in organizations.