2 NEUROSCIENCE IN SERVICE RESEARCH: AN OVERVIEW AND DISCUSSION OF ITS POSSIBILITIES STRUCTURED ABSTRACTPurpose: The paper discusses recent developments in neuroscientific methods and demonstrates its potential for the service field. This work is a call to action for more service researchers to adopt promising and increasingly accessible neuro-tools that allow the service field to benefit from neuroscience theories and insights.Design/methodology/approach: The paper synthesizes key literature from a variety of domains (e.g., neuroscience, consumer neuroscience, organizational neuroscience) to provide an in-depth background to start applying neuro-tools. Specifically, this paper outlines the most important neuro-tools today and discusses their theoretical and empirical value.Findings: To date, the use of neuro-tools in the service field is limited. This is surprising given the great potential they hold to advance service research. To stimulate the use of neurotools in the service area, the authors provide a roadmap to enable neuroscientific service studies and conclude with a discussion on promising areas (e.g., service experience, servicescape) ripe for neuroscientific input.Originality/value: The paper offers service researchers a starting point to understand the potential benefits of adopting the neuroscientific method and shows their complementarity with traditional service research methods like surveys, experiments, and qualitative research.In addition, this paper may also help reviewers and editors to better assess the quality of neuro-studies in service.

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PurposeService robots have increasingly been utilized in retail settings, yet empirical research on how frontline employees (FLEs) might deal with this new reality remains scarce. This mixed-methods study aims to examine how FLEs expect physical service robots to impact job characteristics and affect their job engagement and well-being.Design/methodology/approachFirst, explorative interviews (Study 1; N = 32) were conducted to investigate how FLEs currently experience job characteristics and how they believe robots might impact these job characteristics and job outcomes. Next, a survey (Study 2; N = 165) examined the relationship between job characteristics that retail FLEs expect to be impacted by robots and their own well-being and job engagement.FindingsWhile the overall expectations for working with robots are mixed, retail FLEs expect that working with robots can alleviate certain job demands, but robots cannot help to replenish their job resources. On the contrary, most retail FLEs expect the pains and gains associated with robots in the workspace to cancel each other out, leaving their job engagement and well-being unaffected. However, of the FLEs that do anticipate that robots might have some impact on their well-being and job engagement, the majority expect negative effects.Originality/valueThis study is unique in addressing the trade-off between expected benefits and costs inherent to job demands-resources (JD-R) theory while incorporating a transformative service research (TSR) lens. By integrating different streams of research to study retail FLEs' expectations about working with robots and focusing on robots' impact on job engagement and well-being, this study offers new insights for theory and practice.