Comparisons and competitiveness among employees have been around as long as there have been workplaces. But those frictions are taking fresh shape as use of artificial intelligence and robotics starts to spread through businesses.

That's why companies should pay attention to how humans relate to robot co-workers, say a pair of researchers affiliated with the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

Their recent study shows that human employees can believe their jobs are at risk and their morale can sink when working with robots, specifically where performance comparisons are involved. Just as employees can divide into cliques — psychologically identifying themselves with an "in" group they belong to and "out" groups they don't — humans can feel in competition with robot counterparts and outclassed by them.

"Robots represent a new kind of workplace out-group because they are often expected to outperform humans," says Xian Zhao, a former postdoctoral research fellow at the Rotman School and now assistant professor at Ohio University. "This distinctive characteristic makes performance comparisons with robots especially likely to translate into realistic threats to employees' job security."

That pattern repeated itself across five experiments run by Zhao and research co-authors Geoffrey Leonardelli, a professor at the Rotman School, and Xiaoxiao Zhang of Shenzhen University, involving more than 2,500 participants in China and Canada. Participants who were asked to imagine receiving lower performance ratings than robots reported higher perceptions of job threat from those co-workers. They also reported more negative workplace attitudes as a result, such as reduced feelings of job security, commitment to the company and job satisfaction. Manipulating the robots' appearance to make them more like humans did not alleviate the negative feelings.

Similar bad feelings can bubble up and morale can be hurt even when humans are outperformed by other human co-workers — something confirmed in the research when participants were asked to imagine themselves in that scenario. The twist in that case though was that people still felt threatened by robots, even when they weren't being directly compared with them.

"Negative performance comparisons with other people can imply your group is replaceable," says Leonardelli, a professor of organizational behaviour and human resource management. "That sense of replaceability can leave people fearful of robots as a plausible substitute and potentially superior alternative for low-performing workers."

Fortunately, companies may be able to ease the discord. One possibility the researchers found was to assess employee performance against a benchmark. Even more promising though were team-based incentive policies. When study participants were told they were being evaluated and rewarded in a human-robot team instead of individually, their workplace attitudes were not negatively impacted. Still, the humans continued to feel nervous about being replaced by their non-human co-workers.

As use of robots and their technology continues to evolve, they may eventually make it into leadership positions due to their superior performance, the researchers say. Given the researchers' study findings and the possibility of human worker pushback, companies might consider setting robots up as assistants to human workers to make them less threatening, even as they simultaneously fulfil managerial functions.

"As relationships between humans and robots become increasingly intertwined, society and industry will begin to explore a wider range of possible relational forms," predicts Zhao.

The study appeared in the European Journal of Social Psychology.