Know Before You Speak: Supporting Global Team Formation with Social Profile Displays in Virtual Environments

Global work collaboration creates invisible physical and social barriers. Collaborating across non-physical barriers can be communicatively and cognitively taxing, which may disincentivize workers to form and participate in global teams with diverse members. As virtual environments (VEs) enabled by VR and game technologies become prevalent in global work, it is important to consider the design of workers' profiles to socially display language information in a way that supports global team formation. We conducted an online study involving participants from the U.S. and Japan to find team members in a VE - Gather Town. Participants were asked to form teams and complete a slogan generation task under one of the following profile display conditions - no display, constant display, and adaptive display to supplement language and personal cues. We studied how participants' search cost and attitudes towards global teamwork were affected. Our findings reveal team formation strategies depending on workers' local cultures and profile information available.