Abstract:
Given the trajectory of artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous conversational agents such as social robots will likely soon join teams in the workplace. A potential role such agents will play is adopting the role of facilitators, for example, facilitating certain tasks like a Scrum master in agile software development projects. In this role, they need to enact a certain degree of control over the Scrum team. It is unclear how human team members would react to a robotic Scrum master’s control style, which could be more enabling or more authoritative. Based on a vignette-based experiment supported with rich video animations, our findings suggest that a robot’s enabling control style results in higher team members’ job satisfaction because the robot’s enabling style leads to more trust. Thus, trust positively mediates the relationship between control style and job satisfaction. No mediation effect was found for monitoring. These findings have implications for control theory and conversational agents design. In this talk, I will also complement our findings with first insights we gained from a laboratory experiment, where subjects interact with a NAO robot as a Scrum Master in a role-playing game.
Short Bio:
Isabella Seeber is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Technology and Strategy at the Grenoble Ecole de Management. Since 2013, she holds a doctorate degree from the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Isabella’s research focuses on AI-enabled conversational agents in team collaboration, team- and crowd-based innovation, digital nudging, and Collaboration Engineering. She also successfully acquired external funding for her research projects (FWF-P 29765, FWF-J 3735). Her research has appeared in journals such as Journal of Management Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, Computers in Human Behavior, Information & Management, or Group Decision and Negotiation.