Investigating the influence of human-robot collaboration on front-line employee behaviors in the smart manufacturing industries

At present, intelligent manufacturing has become an important trend in manufacturing industry, and the application of robot reflects the degree of intelligent manufacturing. Among them, collaborative robots will be applied more in smart factories. However, there is a lack of in-depth research on the impact of human-robot collaboration on many typical psychological states and behavioral responses of front-line employees in the business management practice and academia. This project plans to stand in the perspective of the enterprise, take intelligent manufacturing human-machine cooperation as the research scene, take front-line employees as the research object, and discuss the typical psychological state and behavior of front-line employees after working together with collaborative robots. Specifically, this project will apply experiment research method to examine the direct and interactive effects of human-robot collaboration elements (robot factors, human factors and interaction/task scenario) on the front-line employees' trust in robot, human-identity threat, and loneliness. In addition, it will further reveal front-line employees’ self-improvement behavior, counter-productive work behavior,
helping behavior towards colleagues and family supporting behavior after the intermediary of the above psychological state, and explore the cross-level/same-level moderating mechanism of the flexible human resource management practice, supervisory support behavior and work-family centrality. The contribution of this project is proposing human-robot collaboration models and deepen the research from the perspective of enterprises based on the theories, like social identity theory and self-completion theory.