Empathosphere: Promoting Constructive Communication in Ad-hoc Virtual Teams through Perspective-taking Spaces

Abstract

When members of ad-hoc virtual teams need to collectively ideate or deliberate, they often fail to engage with each others' perspectives in a constructive manner. At best, this leads to sub-optimal outcomes, and, at worst, it can cause conflicts that lead to teams not wanting to continue working together. Prior work has attempted to facilitate constructive communication by highlighting problematic communication patterns and nudging teams to alter their interaction norms. However, these approaches achieve limited success because they fail to acknowledge two social barriers: (1) it is hard to reset team norms mid-interaction, and (2) corrective nudges have limited utility unless team members believe it is safe to voice their opinion and that their opinion will be heard. This paper introduces Empathosphere, a chat-embedded intervention to mitigate these barriers and foster constructive communication in teams. To mitigate the first barrier, Empathosphere leverages the known benefits of "experimental spaces" in dampening existing norms and creating a climate conducive to change. Empathosphere instantiates this "space'' as a separate communication channel in a team's workspace. To mitigate the second barrier, Empathosphere harnesses the benefits of perspective-taking to cultivate a group climate that promotes a norm of members speaking up and engaging with each other. Empathosphere achieves this by orchestrating authentic socio-emotional exchanges designed to induce perspective-taking. A controlled study ($N=110$) compared Empathosphere to an alternate intervention strategy of prompting teams to reflect on their team experience. We found that Empathosphere led to higher work satisfaction, encouraged more open communication and feedback within teams, and boosted teams' desire to continue working together. This work demonstrates that "experimental spaces," particularly those that integrate methods of encouraging perspective-taking, can be a powerful means of improving communication in virtual teams.