Human-robot collaboration and customer-directed spillover: A daily diary study of state job apathy

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) is increasingly prevalent in hospitality and tourism, yet its affective implications for employees remain insufficiently understood. Drawing on Affective Events Theory and the Effort-Recovery Model, this study proposes state job apathy as a novel low-activation affective mechanism linking daily HRC to next-morning customer-directed behaviors, specifically enacted incivility toward customers and customer stewardship behavior. We further examine psychological detachment as a recovery-based moderator of this spillover process. A 10-day consecutive daily diary study was conducted with 206 hospitality and tourism employees in China, yielding 1016 matched within-person observations. Multilevel path analyses revealed that daily HRC frequency was positively associated with end-of-day state job apathy, which in turn predicted greater enacted incivility and reduced customer stewardship behavior the following morning. State job apathy partially mediated these cross-day relationships. Psychological detachment was also found to moderate the carryover of state job apathy to next-morning customer-directed behaviors: the indirect effects of HRC via apathy were significant when psychological detachment was low, but non-significant when psychological detachment was high. These findings advance HRC research by identifying a low-arousal affective pathway that complements existing threat-based accounts, suggesting that the potential behavioral risks associated with robot collaboration extend beyond the workday into subsequent customer interactions. Practically, the results highlight the importance of recovery-supportive workplace practices and job redesign strategies to mitigate the cumulative affective implications of robot-intensive work environments.