Fueled by the pervasion of tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, the usage of text-based communication in distributed teams has grown massively in organizations. This brings distributed teams many advantages, however, a critical shortcoming in these setups is the decreased ability of perceiving, understanding and regulating emotions. This is problematic because better team members? abilities of emotion management positively impact team-level outcomes like team cohesion and team performance, while poor abilities diminish communication flow and well-being. Leveraging chatbot technology in distributed teams has been recognized as a promising approach to reintroduce and improve upon these abilities. In this article we present three chatbot designs for emotion management for distributed teams. In order to develop these designs, we conducted three participatory design workshops which resulted in 153 sketches. Subsequently, we evaluated the designs following an exploratory evaluation with 27 participants. Results show general stimulating effects on emotion awareness and communication efficiency. Further, they report emotion regulation and increased compromise facilitation through social and interactive design features, but also perceived threats like loss of control. With some design features adversely impacting emotion management, we highlight design implications and discuss chatbot design recommendations for enhancing emotion management in teams.
Leading teams effectively is an essential factor for team performance. Main events where leaders practice leadership are videomeetings which are core elements of remote teamwork. However, leading teams is challenging. In particular, in video-meetings, leadership is complex due to limitations such as aggravated understanding of social signals and team dynamics. Voice-based smart personal assistants (SPA) such as Amazon's Alexa can provide realtime support and have the potential to maintain effective leadership in video-meetings. Therefore, we developed the SPA LeadBoSki for real-time leadership support in video-meetings. LeadBoSki detects leadership potentials in video-meetings and sends leadership potential advice to the leader. Pilot study results with two real-world teams (n=9) show a positive leader experience and stimulating behavior by the leader for the team members' motivation. Our work contributes with the SPA LeadBoSki as the first SPA for leadership support in video-meetings of its kind and as a potential use-case for future workplaces.
CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Sound-based input / output; Interactive systems and tools; Natural language interfaces.
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