Social Augmentation of Enterprise Communication Systems for Virtual Teams Using Chatbots

Innovative collaborative applications like Slack or Microsoft Teams have become an integral part of the working environment. The communication in teams, especially at work, is aggravated by socio-technical challenges which prohibit teams from reaching their optimal performance. This research addresses these problems and designs an enterprise communication system to actively support team interaction in order to increase team performance. Through social augmentation of the communication processes with chatbots this is achieved, leveraging cognitive-affective user states. First results of the system prototype evaluation are promising, showing an improvement of team cohesion and communication effectiveness induced through the design. Serving as indication, future steps are outlined guiding the research path for social augmentation of team communication.