ABSTRACT

Robotisation is increasing in warehouse operations, but human employment continues

to be relevant. Traditionally manual activities, such as order picking, are being re-
designed into collaborative human–robot tasks. This trend exemplifies the transition
towards a human-centric Industry 5.0,focusing on synergy instead of seeking human
replacement. However, human workers are increasingly hard to recruit and retain. We
contribute to the underrepresented literature on human factors within the domain of
operations and production management research and investigate the deployment of
robotic technologies alongside human workers in a sustainable way. With a unique
realeffortexperiment, we investigate how the manipulation of picker’s experienced
levels of autonomy affects their job satisfaction and core self-evaluations, two key
behavioural outcomes that determine employee turnover intentions. We establish that
the introduction of human–robot collaboration positively affects job satisfaction for the
contrasting collaboration dynamics of (i) gaining control (the human leading the robot)
and (ii) ceding control (the human following the robot). This positive effect is larger
when the human is following the robot. We additionally find that following the robot
positively affects pickers’ self-esteem and that self-efficacy related to human–robot
interaction benefits from the introduction of collaborative robotics, regardless of the
setup dynamics.

INTRODUCTION
In warehouses, the robots are coming, but the humans are here to stay. By
deploying humans to complemente robot labour or by using robots to supplement
human labour, humans still play a key role in warehouse operations (Azadeh, De
Koster, and Roy 2019; Ben-Ari and Mondada 2018; Fragapane et al. 2021). The size of
the warehouse robotics automation industry has been growing by 12% on average per
year from 2014 through 2019 (The Logistics iQ 2020). Adding more automation in a
warehouse might not always be feasible. Important warehousing tasks such as order
picking cannot be easily standardised or automated, due to the common plethora of
products, each with different handling, stacking, and processing requirements (Azadeh,
De Koster, and Roy 2019). Tasks like order picking typically require the flexibility and
ability for customisation that human labourers provide, necessitating them to be
involved in at least a part of the task. In those situations where human labour is still
needed in increasingly robotised warehouses, humans are deployed to complement
robot labour (Financial Times 2021). Such purposely designed robots, or ‘cobots’ are
intended to ‘combine the repetitive performance of robots with the individual skills and
ability of people’ (International Organization for Standardization 2016).As such,many
warehouses are becoming part-manual, part-robot, thus forming systems of
collaboration.
Consequently, while robots rush the warehouses in greater numbers,
warehousing job vacancies for human workers are rising just as fast, with an example of
13.6% growth on average year-after-year in the US (The Wall Street Journal 2021).
This growth was spurred by the increased emphasis on e-commerce during the Covid-
19 pandemic. According to a salary data report ranking career trends across 15,000+job
titles posted on LinkedIn, warehouse workers on the frontlines of ecommerce became
the most in-demand employees in 2020 (Seaman 2021).Many warehouses that struggled
to meet surging online demand while facing a tight labour market, turned to robots that
can work alongside humans and complement their performance (The Wall Street
Journal 2021). In those situations, robots are used to supplement human labour and
augment it by alleviating time-consuming and repetitive tasks such as transporting
finished orders to a depot.
However, the way the work is divided between robots and humans in such
collaborative systems may have an impact on dehumanisation and intensification of
work whichmay plummet job satisfaction and ultimately incite employee dropout rates
in semi-robotised warehouses (Financial Times 2021; The Guardian 2020). Such
increased dropout rates in semi-robotised warehouses may intensify the existing
problem of high warehouse worker turnover. Specifically, the demand for human
workers in warehouses dwarves five-fold the growth in low-skilled warehousing jobs.
This indicates a high degree of turnover. In the US, it has concurrently grown at a non-
sustainable rate of 73% year-over-year (Seaman 2021). In one extreme case, Amazon
has been accused of ‘burning through’ workers at turnover rates of even 150% per year,
effectively replacing its entire warehouse workforce every eight months (New York
Times 2021). Companies that do not actively maintain satisfied employees might
simply find no more employees to work in their new collaborative robotics setups.
The potential pitfalls emerging from the novel context posed by human–robot
collaboration are recognised by researchers and governments alike. Recent calls for
research argue for the crucial importance of understanding the yet unknown
implications of the human factor in production systems that deploy humans alongside
robotic technologies (Donohue, Özer, and Zheng 2020; Olsen and Tomlin 2020). Even
though high-level frameworks might be available for assessing how changes of work
characteristics affect the job satisfaction of employees in an increasingly robotised
environment, collaborative robotic systems are a novice and largely unexplored research
opportunity (Winkelhaus, Grosse, and Glock 2022). Also on a policy level, this issue is
recognised. In its vision for Industry 5.0, the European Commission has also called for a
human-centric approach to technology-driven progress. Such an approach is necessary
to establish resilient future prosperity by promoting considerations that include
autonomy, human dignity,job satisfaction, andmental well-being of workers
collaborating with robots (Breque, De Nul, and Petrides 2021; European Commission
2021).
This study investigates the immediate effects of imposing a human–robot
collaboration (order picker with robots), as a proxy to understand the longer-term
effects of such collaboration on the picker’s key behavioural outcomes that are related
to employee turnover.We consider job satisfaction as a critical factor that is known to
relate to employee turnover (Griffeth, Hom, and Gaertner 2000), and core self-
evaluations as constructs further associated with job satisfaction (Judge et al. 1998,
2000, 2005; Judge and Bono 2001) and hence employee turnover. We, therefore,
investigate the following questions: (1) How does the collaboration with robots affect
the order picker’s job satisfaction? (2) How does the introduction of collaboration with
robots affect the order picker’s core self-evaluations (in terms of self-esteem and self-
efficacy)? (3) How does the introduction of collaborative robotics affect a picker’s self-
efficacy in human–robot interaction? We contribute to the literature of operations and
production management research in the following ways. Firstly, we propose job
satisfaction and core self-evaluations as metrics for assessing the long-term success of
human and robot collaborative systems. Secondly, we establish that the introduction of
robots affects the picker’s job satisfaction, his or her core self-evaluations (self-esteem,
self-efficacy), and the new context-specific self-evaluation trait of self-efficacy in
human–robot interaction. Thirdly,we investigate these effects under different human–
robot collaborative order picking systems, namely, with the human leading and the
human following the robot. The results of this study will enable companies that
introduce collaborative robotic solutions in warehouses to identify the desirable system
design characteristics that relate to lower labour turnover, and hence sustainable long-
term success.