Would You be Willing to Share Knowledge with a Collaborative Robot? The Mediating Effect of Perceived Agency and the Moderating Effect of Identity Threat

Human-robot collaboration lays the foundation for productivity improvement in the era of Industry 5.0, and human employees' work knowledge sharing with collaborative robots (cobots) is the key to realize this goal. Since the motivation of human knowledge-sharing behavior is affected by factors such as values and job threats, this study started from an intrinsic motivation perspective, based on the similarity-attraction paradigm and the agency theory, and recruited 306 subjects online through the experimental vignette methodology to carry out the study, and found that 1) perceived intelligence and perceived agency mediates the relationship between human-cobot deep similarity and knowledge-sharing behavior towards cobots, respectively; 2) perceived intelligence and perceived agency chain-mediate the relationship between human-cobot deep similarity and knowledge-sharing behavior towards cobots; and 3) identity threat negatively moderates the relationship between perceived agency and knowledge-sharing behavior towards cobots. The above findings provide mechanistic-level explanations for understanding employees' knowledge-sharing behaviors toward cobots and practical suggestions for reducing human threat perceptions toward cobots.