Knowing Unknown Teammates: Exploring Anonymity and Explanations in a Teammate Information-Sharing Recommender System

A growing organizational trend is to utilize ad-hoc team formation which allows for teams to intentionally form based on the member skills required to accomplish a specific task. Due to the unfamiliar nature of these teams, teammates are often limited by their understanding of one another (e.g., teammate preferences, tendencies, attitudes) which limits the team’s functioning and efficiency. This study conceptualizes and investigates the use of a teammate information-sharing recommender system which selectively shares interpersonal recommendations between unfamiliar teammates (e.g., “Your voice may be overshadowed by this teammate when making decisions...") to promote teammate understanding. Through a mixed-methods approach involving 105 participants working on actual unfamiliar teams, this study explores how presentation elements such as anonymity and explanations influence system perceptions and how anonymity influences team outcomes. Results indicate that anonymizing recommendations was associated with worse team measures, particularly team satisfaction and team cohesion. Qualitative results shed light on why team members perceived privacy concerns and team benefits associated with using the system. We contribute to CSCW through a better understanding of how to support unfamiliar teams, the conceptualization and empirical investigation of a novel teammate information-sharing recommender system, and foundational design recommendations associated with such a system.