Chatbots in Collaborative Settings and their Impact on Virtual Teamwork

Chatbots have emerged as a powerful tool for collaborative teamwork. In this paper, we investigate the influence of chatbots on virtual teamwork within the context of a collaborative online activity. To assess chatbots' impact on group dynamics and performance, we designed a novel collaborative activity with an associated online platform and a custom chatbot assistant. We recruited 72 participants divided into four-person teams, with the teams split into four conditions depending on the chatbot's assistance strategy (none, by private chat, by group chat, or both). We found that chatbot assistance improved participants' performance and reduced response times to information requests during the collaborative activity. This improvement was more pronounced for teams in the group and both chats conditions, while participants in the private chat condition reported significantly higher perceived effort. Furthermore, we observed a significant correlation between the perceived quality of the chatbot's communication skills and the cognitive workload and time pressure experienced by the participants. Our findings contribute to the field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work by proposing a new design of experimental activity to study virtual collaboration, providing insights that can inform the design of future collaboration tools and adding to our broader understanding of human-AI synergy in group settings.