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The hospitality industry has recently witnessed explosive growth in robotization with the replacement of robots in many areas. Yet, a key consideration in this robotics wave is whether competition (i.e. robots take over all human tasks) or collaboration (i.e. humans collaborate closely with robots to perform work better) will define the future of the hospitality workspace. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on this controversial issue by taking a collaborative perspective to address the future human–robot relationship in hospitality workplace (i.e. cobotic team).

Drawing upon relevant theories and extant robotics literature, this paper will develop a critical reflection on the management of future cobotic team as a new phenomenon in hospitality industry.

The successful management of cobotics in hospitality lies in three interrelated key domains: feeling intelligence training for frontline employees, ethics governance for cobotics and trust building toward robot partners.

How to manage this cobotic team efficiently will be a focus for hospitality managers in the coming years. This paper offers several managerial insights for hospitality managers and practitioners regarding effectively managing the future collaboration between humans and robots within a dynamic work environment.

This study addresses cobotics as a critical yet unaddressed shift in the contemporary hospitality sector and proposes a framework highlighting three key domains for managing this cobotic team effectively. This framework also sets the direction to encourage more future empirical research exploring cobotic workforce in hospitality.

Although existing literature emphasizes the significance of diversity and inclusion in management roles for employees, there is a notable absence of a standardized scale to assess employees’ perceptions of an inclusive climate, particularly in relation to practices that encourage acceptance of demographically diverse leaders. This study aims to bridge this gap by developing the perceived inclusion climate for leader diversity (PICLD) scale.

The scale development process was carried out in five phases which included: qualitative component (interviews); test for face validity; check for content validity; construct and criterion-related validity; and nomological network testing.

Following the first three phases of scale development, 12 measurement items were produced. Phase four results indicate that PICLD is distinct from both the intercultural group climate scale and diversity-oriented leadership scale, in which all three scales were found to be positively correlated with job satisfaction. Phase five results show that PICLD positively correlates with organizational justice. Organizational justice also mediates the relationship between PICLD and three employee outcomes (performance, engagement and turnover intention).

Organizations are encouraged to be open to suggestions made by managers from historically marginalized groups that motivate diverse leaders to voice their concerns to foster inclusionary climate perceptions among employees. Welcoming diverse managerial perspectives can dismantle systemic barriers, enabling marginalized leaders to thrive while fostering employees’ perceptions of an inclusionary workplace.

This study introduces the PICLD Scale to enhance comprehension of how policies supporting leader demographic diversity impact employee perceptions of inclusive climate. This research also contributes to the advancement of social exchange theory and literature on organizational justice, performance and engagement.

This study aims to examine the scientific publications related to leadership research in hospitality from 2000 to 2021 by conducting a systematic review (qualitative) and to discuss implications for future research.

For the qualitative approach, the authors conduct an in-depth critique of major leadership theories using 167 articles indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection.

The findings show that transformational leadership, leader–member exchange and servant leadership are the most prominent leadership topics studied from 2000 to 2021, followed by abusive supervision, empowering leadership, ethical leadership and authentic leadership. A framework is presented highlighting the mediators, moderators, outcomes, sample and research designs used in each of these lines of leadership research. Moreover, 16 areas for further research are identified and discussed.

This review uncovers scholars’ general lack of regard for how the study of leadership might benefit from examining hospitality as a special and challenging context for leadership and business performance.

This study reviews and critically analyzes leadership research in hospitality using qualitative methods. Therefore, the authors believe this review is of great value to academics and practitioners because it synthesizes and analyzes the field and identifies important research opportunities.

The purpose of this study is to examine the mediating effect of psychological well-being between organizational dehumanization and two outcome variables: service recovery performance and service sabotage. This research also investigates whether organizational tenure moderates the relationship between organizational dehumanization and psychological well-being.

Using survey methodology, 200 hotel frontline service employees (FLEs) in Turkey were sampled over two time points. Additionally, employees’ direct supervisors rated their service recovery performance. The partial least squares method, specifically SmartPLS 3.3.3, was used for data analysis.

The results indicate that organizational dehumanization negatively influences employees’ psychological well-being. However, organizational tenure moderates this relationship, in which organizational dehumanization has less of a negative effect on employees’ psychological well-being in those with longer tenure. Psychological well-being was found to mediate the relationship between organizational dehumanization and service recovery performance. Finally, psychological well-being mediates the relationship between organizational dehumanization and service sabotage.

Managers should consider the negative effect organizational dehumanization has on FLEs’ psychological well-being and aim to establish an organizational culture that values these employees as individuals and as invaluable resources for the organization. Further, this study has found that less tenured employees are less likely to have the psychological resources to cope with organizational dehumanization and are more susceptible to decreased productivity (i.e. service recovery performance) and engaging in counterproductive work behaviors (i.e. service sabotage) due to mistreatment in the workplace.

This study furthers our understanding of organizational dehumanization, an understudied concept in hospitality research, which influences employee outcomes. The findings of this study contribute to the advancement of the self-determination theory and how organizational dehumanization impacts psychological well-being. It also contributes to the conservation of resources theory and current literature on service recovery performance and service sabotage.

While robots have increasingly threatened frontline employees’ (FLEs) future employment by taking over more mechanical and analytical intelligence tasks, they are still unable to “experience” and “feel” to occupy empathetic intelligence tasks that can be handled better by FLEs. This study, therefore, aims to empirically develop and validate a scale measuring the new so-called empathetic creativity as being creative in practicing and performing empathetically intelligent skills during service encounters.

This study adopts a multistage design to develop the scale. Phase 1 combines a literature review with text mining from 3,737 service robots-related YouTube comments to generate 16 items capturing this new construct. Phase 2 assesses both face and content validity of those items, while Phase 3 recruits Prolific FLEs sample to evaluate construct validity. Phase 4 checks this construct’s nomological validity using PLS-SEM and Phase 5 experiments dedicated effort (vs natural talent) as an effective approach to foster FLEs’ perceived empathetic creativity.

The final scale is comprised of 13 refined items that capture three dimensions (social, interactive and emotional) of empathetic creativity. This research provides timely implications to help FLEs in high-contact services stay competitive.

This study introduces the new construct of empathetic creativity, which goes beyond the traditional definition of creativity in services and highlights the importance of empathetic intelligence for FLEs in future employment. This study also develops a multi-item scale to measure this construct, which can be applied to future service management research.