Humanoid robot adoption and labour productivity: a perspective on ambidextrous product innovation routines

The increasing presence of humanoid robot adoption has generated a change in explorative and exploitative routines. If the explorative routines provoke creativity and critical thinking which are delivered by humans, exploitative routines induce repetitive actions and mimic activities which are executed by humanoids. This has raised the need for a better balance between both routines involving an ambidextrous dynamic process. Here, product innovations play a relevant role in enhancing such balance and labour productivity. If, from the conceptual standpoint, this phenomenon has already been explored, there is still the need to empirically analyse it. We thus offer a meso-analysis of twenty-four countries located in Europe through the lens of the Service Robot Deployment (SRD) Model and the conceptual lens of organizational ambidexterity. By a regression methodology, the results show that humanoid robot adoption is still not affecting labour productivity which, by contrast, is positively and significantly connected with both radically new and marginally modified/unchanged production of innovative routines. Our original contribution, which falls in the field of Human Resources Management and Artificial Intelligence, is that humanoids are not directly impacting labour productivity but indirectly through the generation of both new and marginally modified (or unchanged) routines. This situation persuades senior leaders to achieve a balance between exploitative and explorative product innovation routines. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2021.1897643.