Analysing Factory Workers’ Acceptance of Collaborative Robots: A Web-Based Tool for Company Representatives

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. In introduction, research question and research goals should be clearly stated.

2. Literature survey should be expanded with more recent MDPI and Electronics publications, include at least some of the following:
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/10/16/1976
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/12/7/109
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/10/11/1317
https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/19/6654
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/10/18/2300
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/10/6/666

3. Try to avoid using acronyms in the abstract

4. Developed employee acceptance tool implementation should be discussed in more details.

5. The tool could be compared with similar tools (if they exist)

6. The limitations of the approach should be clearly indicated in the conclusion

7. Future work should be indicated in the conclusion

8. Minor English grammar and language errors.

Author Response

Thank you very much for the effort you have put into the paper and your helpful improvement suggestions. In the following, we provide a detailed list explaining how we dealt with each of your comments. Our changes in the revised version of our article are tracked to make them easy to identify. We are looking forward to your feedback on the revised version.

# 1 We agree that the motivation and intention of our article has not been sufficiently addressed. Therefore, we adjusted the introduction accordingly.

#2 Thank you for providing this interesting additional literature. We included three of the listed publications (see [22],[44],[59]) which seemed particularly suitable for our work.

#3 Thank you for the advice to avoid acronyms in the abstract. We have now spelled out the abbreviations.

#4 We agree that implementation had not been sufficiently addressed so far. With the additions at the beginning of chapter 3, we try to take this into account. Furthermore, your comment has motivated us to rename the headings (Conceptualisation, Implementation, Evaluation) in order to provide a better guiding on the one hand and to better contextualize the implementation in chapter 3 on the other.

#5 We also considered a comparison with existing acceptance tools to be useful. However, we could not find comparable tools within our extensive literature research. We highlighted the uniqueness of our tool with an additional sentence in the introduction (‘However, to the best of our knowledge, no such approaches yet…’).

#6 and #7 Thank you for raising this point. In this revised version we now discuss limitations of our work like a lack of empirical validity of the acceptance factors and the small sample size for the evaluation. Further, we advocate for future research aimed at translating the research topic of technology adoption into practice and extending our findings to larger companies.

#8 We have proofread the article several times and hope to have corrected all the errors that remained before. Further, we believe that our article has improved linguistically as a result of our extensive proofreading

Reviewer 2 Report

1. Studying the ccollaborative robots on a web-based tool in terms of SMEs environment, employee acceptance this technology is an interesting and worthy research topic. However, the research methodology and data analysis need to be explained and justified in a more rigorous manner.
2. There is no discussion grounded to justify the content validity regarding to the six essential acceptance factors (p2-5), including job security, occupational safety, workforce structure, corporate culture and appreciation, changing work routines, and human-centred design.
3. In a similar sense, there is no rationale has been provided as to the scores based on the given answers assigned to the six essential acceptance factors (p7).  Also, the justification between the factor score with the visualized traffic lights should be provided (p7).
4. Justification as to the qualitative evaluation supports (transcripts) from five representatives has not been provided (p9-11). The justification of these transcripts should be showed up with “italic” to support each discussion on page 9-11.

Author Response

Thank you very much for the effort you have put into the paper and your helpful improvement suggestions. In the following, we provide a detailed list explaining how we dealt with each of your comments. Our changes in the revised version of our article are tracked to make them easy to identify. We are looking forward to your feedback on the revised version.

#1 and #2: We agree that we have not sufficiently discussed the methodology of selecting the acceptance factors and their validity. We therefore presented at the beginning of Chapter 2 in a clearer way, how we derived our acceptance factors based on our previous research and stated as a limitation in Chapter 5 that the acceptance factors were not empirically validated. Further, we described the methodology and how we analysed the data given by our qualitative interviews in more detail in Chapter 4.1.

#3 Indeed the justification of the scores on the given answers and the visualized traffic lights was missing. We therefore recoded the answering-scales from (1)-(5) to (-2)-(2). This gave us the possibility to clearer explain and justify (see Chapter 3.1 and 3.2) the influences of the factor scores on the traffic lights (a negative average score leads to a red traffic light, a positive score >1 leads to a green light). Further, we explained the scales in more detail and how the given answers were assigned to the six acceptance factors.

#4 We thank you for you constructive feedback to support the evaluation by transcripts in italic. Accordingly, we added meaningful original statements in chapter 4.2.

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a very important and interesting work. The web-based tool will be of great benefit to enterprises that utilize industrial robots. I just have one suggestion:

You may also spell SMEs in full in the Abstract (Line 9) the first time it is mentioned, similar to Line 35.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your kind words. We are very pleased that you like our work. Thank you also for your comment regarding the abbreviation. We have now spelled out the abbreviations in the abstract.