When Service Robots Enter the Workplace: Providing Information to Humanoid and Android Robots

Service robots are on the rise and are increasingly being used by companies in the workplace and at the customer interface. Recent developments in AI are enhancing the capabilities of service robots. In the workplace, service robots can be used by knowledge workers, i.e., employees who use knowledge as a powerful resource to perform tasks. At the customer interface, service robots are especially on the rise in retail, health care, food service, and hospitality. However, it is unclear how knowledge workers and external customers provide personal information to service robots, especially in the light of growing privacy concerns. Therefore, the overall goal of this dissertation is to investigate privacy concerns and patterns of information disclosure in customer-robot interactions. A particular focus is on android service robots, which look very much like human service providers. The behavior of knowledge workers and external customers towards these android robots is compared to both humanoid robots and human employees. Thus, this dissertation contributes to scientific research at the interface between marketing management and human-robot interaction. With both types of robots, experimental studies were conducted in the workplace, where the service robots performed autonomous tasks in the HR department. Study 1 describes the preparation of these service robots for autonomous customer-robot interactions in the workplace from a design science perspective. Study 2 contributes to the overall goal of this dissertation by examining the influence of privacy concerns on the reluctance to provide personal information in a field experiment. The results show that privacy concerns do not prevent knowledge workers from working with service robots for long periods of time, nor do they mirror actual information reluctance. As the task complexity of customer-robot interactions increases, privacy concerns increase, but information reluctance decreases. There are also differences in the behavior of knowledge workers when providing personal information to humanoid robots versus android robots, depending on task complexity. Study 3 contributes to the overall goal of this dissertation by examining the conversational flow in the interactions with the service robots using video analysis of the field experiment. It can be seen that knowledge workers show more variation in verbal and nonverbal forms of expression when talking to android robots than when talking to humanoid robots. In addition to the field experiment in the workplace, further studies have been conducted with the service robots. Study 4 deals with the effect of social influence on information disclosure when interacting with service robots. It turns out that customers are more willing to provide personal information to android robots when they have previously observed this behavior from peers. Study 5 contributes to the overall goal of this dissertation by introducing a new theoretical concept to research on service robots and information disclosure, the so-called "Blurring Paradox". Based on political speeches in which politicians talk a lot but say little, it is suggested that customers may also tend to talk a lot but say little when interacting with a service robot. In addition to introducing this theoretical concept, this dissertation integrates various theoretical perspectives from different research disciplines, such as the CASA paradigm, task-technology-fit theory, communication accommodation theory, and social impact theory. In addition, this dissertation provides methodological contributions by introducing a scale for measuring the conversational flow when interacting with service robots. From a content-related perspective, the different studies show that employees and external customers adapt the way they provide information depending on whether they are interacting with a service robot or a human service provider. Thus, this dissertation contributes to scientific research and managerial practice in several important ways.