Precious Plastic: Creating a Circular Campus Through Community-Based Plastic Recycling

While robots are increasingly threatening frontline employees’ (FLEs) future employment by taking over more mechanical and analytical intelligence tasks, they are still unable to “experience” and “feel” to occupy empathetic intelligence tasks that can be handled better by FLEs. This study therefore adopts multistage design to develop a scale measuring the new so-called empathetic creativity as FLEs’ being creative in enhancing empathetically intelligent skills. Phase 1 uses text mining to collect 3737 service robots-related YouTube comments to generate 16 items capturing social, interactive, and emotional dimensions of this new construct. Phase 2 assesses both face and content validity of those items while Phase 3 recruits Prolific FLEs sample to evaluate construct validity. Phase 4 checks this construct’s nomological validity using PLS-SEM and Phase 5 experiments dedicated effort (vs. natural talent) as an effective approach to foster FLEs’ perceived empathetic creativity. This research provides timely implications to help FLEs stay competitive.