Principal Investigator: Petra Nieken

Virtual teams are common in today's workplace, but collaboration can be difficult, especially when team members do not know each other well. While previous research shows that communication improves collaboration, less is known about the role of non-verbal cues, particularly when they vary in richness. We implemented an online study where teams participated in a virtual meeting using either audio-only, audio with a selfie, or video, thereby systematically varying the availability and amount of non-verbal cues. Communication occurred before the team learned about the weakest-link game, allowing us to isolate the effects of informal, non-game-related communication.

We observe that adding selfies reduced cooperation compared to audio-only, while the video meeting does not perform better than audio. Our exploratory analysis suggests that differences in group cohesion and perceived human presence could be possible mechanisms. Our findings indicate that not all non-verbal cues support cooperation, and static visual information may even backfire.