Employee-Robot Cowork Experience in Hospitality: scale development and validation

As employee-robot cowork (ERC) with physical robots becomes an emerging work arrangement in hospitality contexts, the unique employee-robot cowork experience (ERCE) of frontline service employees (FLEs) remains critically understudied and lacks adequate measurement. This study addresses this critical gap by undertaking the development and validation of the first multidimensional ERCE scale tailored to this specific context. Employing a rigorous multi-stage approach, we generated an initial item pool through semi-structured interviews (N = 39), refined items via Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) (N = 240), and conducted rigorous scale validation across three independent and diverse samples of FLEs (CFA, N = 192; convergent and discriminant validity testing via US MTurk, N = 150; concurrent and predictive criterion-related validity, N = 102). Results consistently support a stable 15-item, five-dimension structure: cognition function (CF), sensory positive (SP), sensory negative (SN), emotional positive (EP), emotional negative (EN), demonstrating excellent reliability and construct validity. Key contributions include the first validated ERCE scale for the frontline service employee-physical robot cowork context, providing a crucial empirical tool for theory (HRI, TAM) and a reliable diagnostic tool for hospitality managers to improve human-robot collaboration effectiveness and employee well-being.