Working with ELSA – How an Emotional Support Agent Builds Trust in Virtual Teams

Date
2022-01-04
Authors
Hofeditz, Lennart
Harbring, Mareen
Mirbabaie, Milad
Stieglitz, Stefan
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Virtual collaboration is an increasing part of daily life for many employees. Despite many advantages, however, virtual collaborative work can lead to a lack of trust among virtual team members, e.g., due to spatial separation and little social interaction. Previous findings indicated that emotional support provided by a conversational agent (CA) can impact human-agent trust and the perceived social presence. We developed an emotional support agent called ELSA and conducted a between-subject online experiment to examine how CAs can provide emotional support in order to increase the level of trust among colleagues in virtual teams. We found that human-agent trust positively influences the level of calculus-based trust among team members and increases team cohesion, whereas perceived anthropomorphism and social presence towards a CA seems to be less important for trust among team members.
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Collaboration with Intelligent Systems: Machines as Teammates, collaboration, conversational agent, trust, virtual teams
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10 pages
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Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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