Emotional Attachment, Performance, and Viability in Teams Collaborating with Embodied Physical Action (EPA) Robots

Abstract

Although different types of teams increasingly employ embodied physical action (EPA) robots as a collaborative technology to accomplish their work, we know very little about what makes such teams successful. This paper has two objectives: the first is to examine whether a team's emotional attachment to its robots can lead to better team performance and viability; the second is to determine whether robot and team identification can promote a team's emotional attachment to its robots. To achieve these objectives, we conducted a between-subjects experiment with 57 teams working with robots. Teams performed better and were more viable when they were emotionally attached to their robots. Both robot and team identification increased a team's emotional attachment to its robots. Results of this study have implications for collaboration using EPA robots specifically and for collaboration technology in general.

The Growing Problem of Humanizing Robots

“…Research has shown that humans are much more likely to trust robots they view as more human [2,3]. Convincing humans to trust robots is still an important barrier to the adoption of robots in many areas of society [4].…”

How affordances of chatbots cross the chasm between social and traditional enterprise systems

“…Prior research even suggests that humans perceive nonhuman actors with sufficient social cues as social actors; a paradigm referred to as computers-are-social-actors (Nass and Moon 2000;Nass et al 1995Nass et al , 1994. In fact, team performance of human robot teamwork increases with a higher emotional attachment of humans to their robots (Robert 2018;You and Robert 2018). In this regard, studies also show various effects of avatars on the human perception of conversational agents.…”

Alternative Group Technologies and Their Influence on Group Technology Acceptance

“…Although they focused on group valence rather than perceived ease of use and usefulness, their research only examined attitudes toward the adopting technology and did not consider alternative technologies. More recently, You and Robert [4] examined the impact of emotional attachment toward robots on the performance of groups working with robots. Taken together, research in the field of information systems that has examined the adoption of collaboration technologies has not taken into account the role of alternative technologies.…”

“…Robots -intelligent systems that can sense, reason and engage in virtual and/or physical-embodied actions -are being adopted as collaboration technologies [4]. Despite this, little research has been done on understanding the factors that hinder or promote their adoption by groups [5].…”

“…Although work in the field of information systems has been more quantitative while work in other communities such as computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), human factors in computing systems (CHI) and organizational science has been more qualitative -e.g., [1] versus [2] -several systemic themes can found across all communities. Studies on the adoption of collaboration technologies can be divided into two topics: (1) the impact of work group members' attitude toward the collaboration technology, e.g., [3,4]; and (2) the interplay between the technology and the teams' social structure, e.g., [2,5]. The results from these studies indicate that attitudes related to ease of use and usefulness associated with the technology are important predictors of adoption and that collaboration technology can both influence and be influenced by the team's social structure [1][2][3][4][5][6][7].…”