Robot Transparency and Employees’ Acceptance: The Roles of Trust and Anthropomorphism

Robots are more and more widely used in work scenes, but few studies have discussed the influence of robots on front-line employees. This study aims to investigate whether the transparency and anthropomorphism of robots affect employees’ acceptance of robots and its influencing mechanism from the perspective of social identity. We test our hypotheses in two studies. Study 1 examined the main effect of robot transparency on employee’s acceptance and the mediating role of human–robot trust, while Study 2 further examined the main and mediating effects, as well as the moderating role of robot anthropomorphism. The findings revealed that that robot transparency positively affects employee’s acceptance, cognition-based trust mediates the relationship, and the mediating effect of affect-based trust is not significant. Robot anthropomorphism moderates the relationship between transparency and cognition-based trust, it also moderates the mediating effect of cognition-based trust between transparency and employee’s acceptance.