“Matilda is Lazy Today”: How Mind Perceptions Trigger Relational Job Crafting With Industrial Robots
研究发现，即使工业机器人没有拟人化设计，工人也会赋予其心智（如意图和情感），从而触发与机器人的关系性工作重塑，包括调整职责、层级、协作和情感连接，这有助于工人恢复控制感并调节日常压力，最终影响绩效和幸福感。
Industrial robots are increasingly integrated into manufacturing workspaces, leading to significant changes in work design and altering workers’ framing of work and technology. Even without anthropomorphic design or autonomous features, employees may treat industrial robots as more than mere tools, attributing human-like qualities to them. Yet, prior research typically considers technology either as a tool or as an occasion for altering work relationships between humans, overlooking how relationships with technology itself are crafted. Drawing on 133 interviews across multiple organizations—including robot users, robot producers, and solution providers, we show that mind perceptions (attributions of agency and experience to industrial robots) catalyze relational job crafting with robots. We identify four co-evolving practices—crafting responsibilities, crafting hierarchies, crafting collaboration, and crafting emotional connection—that help workers regain control and regulate daily stress levels, thereby linking relational crafting to both performance and well-being outcomes. Our study extends relational job crafting theory by theorizing mind perceptions as the trigger of human-robot relationality and shifts attention from agentic/anthropomorphic design of technologies to workers’ perceptions of these technologies as core drivers of human-robot-interaction and technology adoption in organizations.