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Fear of Being Replaced by Robots and Turnover Intention: Evidence from the Chinese Manufacturing Industry

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Abstract

As China has become the largest user of industrial robots, the need to understand how workers perceive robot-human substitution and how their perceptions influence their job behaviors is becoming increasingly crucial. This paper examined whether workers’ fear of being replaced by robots (FRR) is correlated with one aspect of job behavior: turnover intention, which refers to the extent to which an individual intends to change their job within a specific time period. Using a dataset covering 1512 manufacturing workers in Guangdong province of China, we found that workers who fear losing their jobs to robots report significantly higher turnover intention. We also found that the positive effect of FRR on turnover intention increased when robots were already utilised in the workplace. This effect was also found to be increase when workers perceived that their wages did not increase with the rise in productivity due to robotisation. Based on these findings, we provide practical recommendations to organizations on effectively addressing the turnover intention arising from the FRR.

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Data availability

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Notes

  1. Hukou is the household registration system in mainland China. It indicates whether people live in an agricultural (rural hukou) or non-agricultural area (urban hukou). Previous research has suggested that migrant workers in urban areas with rural hukou generally have lower job embeddedness and higher turnover rate [55]. Thus, we controlled for the hukou variable in the regression analysis.

  2. In the manufacturing industry, micro-scale firms have fewer than 20 employees; small-scale firms have 20–299 employees; medium-scale firms have 300–999 employees; and large-scale firms have 1,000 or more employees [56].

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Funding

The Funding was provided by National Social Science Fund of China, Grant Number 19CSH045, Yunxue Deng

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Politics and Public Administration, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Zhongwei Sun

  2. School of Public Administration, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan, 411105, China

    Yunxue Deng

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  1. Zhongwei Sun
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Correspondence to Yunxue Deng.

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Sun, Z., Deng, Y. Fear of Being Replaced by Robots and Turnover Intention: Evidence from the Chinese Manufacturing Industry. Int J of Soc Robotics 16, 711–723 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-024-01123-3

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