Chatbot-based Emotion Management for Distributed Teams: A Participatory Design Study

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 recognizedas a promising approach to reintroduce and improve upon these abilities. In this article we present three chatbotdesigns for emotion management for distributed teams. In order to develop these designs, we conductedthree 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. ... mehrWith some design features adversely impacting emotion management, we highlight design implications and discuss chatbot design recommendations for enhancing emotion management in teams.