Sharing Economy, Platforms, and Crowds
Paper Number
1305
Paper Type
Completed
Description
Digital labor platforms (and many other digital workplaces) can be anonymous, isolated, and lacking social interaction. In this context, implementing conversational agents (CAs) to provide social presence and relatedness could be a remedy. However, based on research in the context of human-to-human interaction, two counteracting effects of CAs’ social presence can be derived. First, social presence and social relatedness induce enjoyment. Second, social presence can lead to a perception of task pressure, which reduces enjoyment. We conducted a three-condition online experiment with 269 participants from a commercial digital labor platform to investigate these effects. Our results show that social presence directly leads to social relatedness and enjoyment, and indirectly to task pressure. However, this perceived task pressure does not reduce enjoyment and only positively effects performance. Thus, it appears that introducing CAs as part of digital labor platforms is a win-win situation for users and work.
Recommended Citation
Lichtenberg, Sascha; Hildebrandt, Fabian; and Mirbabaie, Milad, "Under Pressure? - The Effect of Conversational Agents on Task Pressure and Social Relatedness in Digital Labor" (2023). ICIS 2023 Proceedings. 3.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2023/sharing_econ/sharing_econ/3
Under Pressure? - The Effect of Conversational Agents on Task Pressure and Social Relatedness in Digital Labor
Digital labor platforms (and many other digital workplaces) can be anonymous, isolated, and lacking social interaction. In this context, implementing conversational agents (CAs) to provide social presence and relatedness could be a remedy. However, based on research in the context of human-to-human interaction, two counteracting effects of CAs’ social presence can be derived. First, social presence and social relatedness induce enjoyment. Second, social presence can lead to a perception of task pressure, which reduces enjoyment. We conducted a three-condition online experiment with 269 participants from a commercial digital labor platform to investigate these effects. Our results show that social presence directly leads to social relatedness and enjoyment, and indirectly to task pressure. However, this perceived task pressure does not reduce enjoyment and only positively effects performance. Thus, it appears that introducing CAs as part of digital labor platforms is a win-win situation for users and work.
When commenting on articles, please be friendly, welcoming, respectful and abide by the AIS eLibrary Discussion Thread Code of Conduct posted here.
Comments
08-Sharing