Working with Robots in Teams: A De-motivating Experience

People tend to be lazier when working in teams with robots. In an experiment, employees were asked to evaluate the quality of their work, with half of them being told that it was done by a robot. It turned out that in such cases, people performed the task less carefully. Scientists explained this phenomenon by stating that employees become less engaged in tasks when they perceive their robotic colleagues as reliable. They concluded that collaborative work can demotivate individuals.