Selective Sharing is Caring: Toward the Design of a Collaborative Tool to Facilitate Team Sharing

Abstract

Temporary teams are commonly limited by the amount of experience with their new teammates, leading to poor understanding and coordination. Collaborative tools can promote teammate team mental models (e.g., teammate attitudes, tendencies, and preferences) by sharing personal information between teammates during team formation. The current study utilizes 89 participants engaging in real-world temporary teams to better understand user perceptions of sharing personal information. Qualitative and quantitative results revealed unique findings including: 1) Users perceived personality and conflict management style assessments to be accurate and sharing these assessments to be helpful, but had mixed perceptions regarding the appropriateness of sharing; 2) Users of the collaborative tool had higher perceptions of sharing in terms of helpfulness and appropriateness; and 3) User feedback highlighted the need for tools to selectively share less data with more context to improve appropriateness and helpfulness while reducing the amount of time to read.