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Did It Have To End This Way?: Understanding The Consistency of Team Fracture

Authors:

Mark E. Whiting,

Allie Blaising,

Melissa Valentine,

Michael S. BernsteinAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 3, Issue CSCW

Article No.: 209, Pages 1 - 23

https://doi.org/10.1145/3359311

Published: 07 November 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Was a problematic team always doomed to frustration, or could it have ended another way? In this paper, we study the consistency of team fracture: a loss of team viability so severe that the team no longer wants to work together. Understanding whether team fracture is driven by the membership of the team, or by how their collaboration unfolded, motivates the design of interventions that either identify compatible teammates or ensure effective early interactions. We introduce an online experiment that reconvenes the same team without members realizing that they have worked together before, enabling us to temporarily erase previous team dynamics. Participants in our study completed a series of tasks across multiple teams, including one reconvened team, and privately blacklisted any teams that they would not want to work with again. We identify fractured teams as those blacklisted by half the members. We find that reconvened teams are strikingly polarized by task in the consistency of their fracture outcomes. On a creative task, teams might as well have been a completely different set of people: the same teams changed their fracture outcomes at a random chance rate. On a cognitive conflict and on an intellective task, the team instead replayed the same dynamics without realizing it, rarely changing their fracture outcomes. These results indicate that, for some tasks, team fracture can be strongly influenced by interactions in the first moments of a team's collaboration, and that interventions targeting these initial moments may be critical to scaffolding long-lasting teams.

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Index Terms

Did It Have To End This Way?: Understanding The Consistency of Team Fracture
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
    1. Collaborative and social computing design and evaluation methods
    2. Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Volume 3, Issue CSCW

November 2019

5026 pages

EISSN:2573-0142

DOI:10.1145/3371885

Editors:
Airi Lampinen
Stockholm University, Sweden
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Darren Gergle
Northwestern University, USA
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David A. Shamma
FXPAL, USA

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Published: 07 November 2019

Published in PACMHCI Volume 3, Issue CSCW

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610074
Wang DMuller MYang QWang ZTan MHobson S(2022)Organizational Distance Also MattersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555546:CSCW2(1-18)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
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Jamieson JFoong EYamashita N(2022)Maintaining ValuesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555506:CSCW2(1-28)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555550
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