'Alexa, Do You Know Anything?' The Impact of an Intelligent Assistant on Team Interactions and Creative Performance Under Time Scarcity

TL;DR

This study investigates how intelligent assistants influence team interactions and creative performance under time scarcity, revealing reduced team interactions and decreased creativity when such assistants are used.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the effects of intelligent assistants on team dynamics and performance under different time conditions, a gap in current literature.

Findings

Teams with assistants interacted less.

Teams under time scarcity used assistants more.

Assistants under time scarcity led to lower creative performance.

Abstract

Human-AI collaboration is on the rise with the deployment of AI-enabled intelligent assistants (e.g. Amazon Echo, Cortana, Siri, etc.) across organizational contexts. It is claimed that intelligent assistants can help people achieve more in less time (Personal Digital Assistant - Cortana, n.d.). However, despite the increasing presence of intelligent assistants in collaborative settings, there is a void in the literature on how the deployment of this technology intersects with time scarcity to impact team behaviors and performance. To fill this gap in the literature, we collected behavioral data from 56 teams who participated in a between-subjects 2 (Intelligent Assistant: Available vs. Not Available) x 2 (Time: Scarce vs. Not Scarce/Control) lab experiment. The results show that teams with an intelligent assistant had significantly fewer interactions between its members compared to teams without an intelligent assistant. Teams who faced time scarcity also used the intelligent assistant more often to seek its assistance during task completion compared to those in the control condition. Lastly, teams with an intelligent assistant underperformed on a creative task compared to those without the device. We discuss implications of this technology from theoretical, empirical, and practical perspectives.