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Working with ELSA : how an Emotional Support Agent Builds Trust in Virtual Teams
Hofeditz, Lennart; Harbring, Mareen; Mirbabaie, Milad; u. a. (2025): Working with ELSA : how an Emotional Support Agent Builds Trust in Virtual Teams, in: Bamberg: Otto-Friedrich-Universität, S. 418–427.
Publisher Information:
Year of publication:
2025
Pages:
Source/Other editions:
Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2022, S. 418–427, ISBN: 978-0-9981331-5-7
Year of first publication:
2022
Language:
English
Abstract:
Virtual collaboration is an increasing part of daily life for many employees. Despite many advantages, however, virtual collaborative work can lead to a lack of trust among virtual team members, e.g., due to spatial separation and little social interaction. Previous findings indicated that emotional support provided by a conversational agent (CA) can impact human-agent trust and the perceived social presence. We developed an emotional support agent called ELSA and conducted a between-subject online experiment to examine how CAs can provide emotional support in order to increase the level of trust among colleagues in virtual teams. We found that human-agent trust positively influences the level of calculus-based trust among team members and increases team cohesion, whereas perceived anthropomorphism and social presence towards a CA seems to be less important for trust among team members.
Keywords: ; ; ;
collaboration
conversational agent
trust
virtual teams
Peer Reviewed:
Yes:
International Distribution:
Yes:
Type:
Conferenceobject
Activation date:
November 10, 2025
Permalink
https://fis.uni-bamberg.de/handle/uniba/110497