Empathosphere: Promoting Constructive Communication in Ad-hoc Virtual Teams through Perspective-taking Spaces
Pranav Khadpe, Chinmay Kulkarni, Geoff Kaufman

TL;DR
Empathosphere is a chat-based intervention that fosters constructive communication in ad-hoc virtual teams by creating experimental spaces and encouraging perspective-taking, leading to better team satisfaction and openness.
Contribution
This paper introduces Empathosphere, a novel chat-embedded tool that combines experimental spaces and perspective-taking to improve communication in virtual teams.
Findings
Empathosphere increased team work satisfaction.
It encouraged more open communication and feedback.
Teams showed a greater desire to continue working together.
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 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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsTeam Dynamics and Performance · Public Relations and Crisis Communication · Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts
