Abstract
The dramatic expansion of internet communication tools has led to the increased use of temporary online groups to solve problems, provide services, or produce new knowledge. However, many of these groups need help to collaborate effectively. The rapid development of new tools and collaboration forms requires ongoing experimentation to develop and test new ways to support this novel form of teamwork. Building on research demonstrating the use of nudges to shape behavior, we report the results of an experiment to nudge teamwork in 168 temporary online groups randomly assigned to one of four different nudge treatments. Each nudge was designed to spur one of three targeted collaborative processes (collaborator skill use, effective task strategy, and the level of collective effort) demonstrated to enhance collective intelligence in extant research. Our results support the basic notion that digitally nudging collaborative processes can improve collective intelligence. However, to our surprise, a couple of nudges had unintended negative effects and ultimately decreased collective intelligence. We discuss our results using structured speculation to systematically consider the conditions under which we would or would not expect the same patterns to materialize in order to clearly articulate directions for future research.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 393-408 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | MIS Quarterly: Management Information Systems |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2024 University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
Funding
Pranav Gupta is an assistant professor at the Gies School of Business at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He received his doctorate in organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon University. He investigates how humans work together adaptively and how technology can augment our capacity for dynamic coordination. His projects focus on understanding the emergence of collective intelligence in self-organized teams using lab experiments, archival data, and agent-based simulation models to improve real-time coordination of their members’ distributed knowledge (collective memory), distributed attention (collective attention), and diverse goals (collective reasoning). His interdisciplinary research has been funded by DARPA and NSF and has been published across journals in management, applied psychology, and computer science. ORCID: 0000-0003-2640-1390 Young Ji Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her doctorate in communication at the University of Southern California. Her main research interests include collective intelligence, transactive memory systems, human-machine teams, and group diversity. Her work has been funded by the Army Research Office and has been published in PNAS and journals in communication and computer science. ORCID: 0000-0002-5769-3771 Ella Glikson is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Business Administration at Bar-Ilan University. She received her doctorate at the Technion-Israeli Institute of Technology and was a post-doctorate fellow at Tepper Business School, Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on computer-mediated and cross-cultural communication in organizational and social settings, as well as human perceptions and trust in artificial intelligence. Her multidisciplinary work has been published in leading management, communication, and applied psychology journals. ORCID: 0000-0001-5653-1861 Anita Williams Woolley is a professor of organizational behavior and the associate dean of research at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Dr. Woolley received her doctorate in organizational behavior at Harvard University, and her research focuses on collective intelligence in human teams and human-computer collaboration, with current projects funded by DARPA and the National Science Foundation focusing on how artificial intelligence can enhance the quality of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration in co-located and remote teams. Dr. Woolley’s research has been published in Science and PNAS as well as many top journals in management, applied psychology, and computer science, and she has served as a senior editor at Organization Science and is a founding associate editor of Collective Intelligence. ORCID: 0000-0003-0620-4744 We thank research assistants Jacob Hollander and Sitong (Spencer) Lin for their help with data collection and Carlos Bothelo for his help with platform development. We are also grateful to members of INGRoup 2019, Collective Intelligence 2019, and AI and Strategy Consortium 2021 for providing valuable feedback on earlier versions of this work. Finally, we express our gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers for their critical feedback, as well as the senior editor and associate editor for shepherding this manuscript. The Institutional Review Board at Carnegie Mellon University approved our human subjects research protocol. This research was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Army Research Office [Grant W911NF-20-1-0006]. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of funding agencies.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| National Science Foundation | |
| PNAS | |
| Jacob Hollander and Sitong | |
| Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency | |
| Harvard University | |
| Army Research Office |
Keywords
- Digital nudges
- collaborative processes
- collective effort
- collective intelligence
- nudge design
- structured speculation
- team skill use
- team task strategy