The effect of interface roughness of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic layers on exchange bias is still not well understood. In this report we have investigated the effect of surface roughness in (111)-oriented antiferromagnetic CoO films on exchange bias with ferromagnetic Fe grown on top. The surface roughness is controlled at the atomic scale, over a range below ~ 0.35 nm, by varying layer thickness of the CoO films. It is observed that both exchange bias field (HE) and coercivity (HC) extensively depend on the atomic scale roughness of the CoO (111) at the interface with Fe film. An opposite dependence of HE and HC on interface roughness was found, which was ascribed to partially compensated spin states induced by the atomic roughness at the fully uncompensated CoO (111) surfaces and was corroborated using the Monte Carlo simulations. Moreover, the onset temperature for HC is found to be up to ~ 80 K below the blocking temperature (TB) and the temperature dependence of HC follows the power law with a critical exponent equal to one, which indicates that, in this system, HC is more of an interface-related property than HE.