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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Comput. Sci.
Sec. Human-Media Interaction
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fcomp.2024.1455903
This article is part of the Research Topic Hybrid Human Artificial Intelligence: Augmenting Human Intelligence with AI View all 4 articles

Developing teamwork: Transitioning between stages in human-agent collaboration

Provisionally accepted
Vera C. Kaelin Vera C. Kaelin *Maitreyee Tewari Maitreyee Tewari *Sara Benouar Sara Benouar Helena Lindgren Helena Lindgren
  • Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Introduction: Human-centric artificial intelligence (HCAI) focuses on systems that support and collaborate with humans to achieve their goals. To better understand how collaboration develops in human-AI teaming, further exploration grounded in a theoretical model is needed. Tuckman's model describes how team development among humans evolves by transitioning through the stages of forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. The purpose of this pilot study was to explore transitions between the first three stages in a collaborative task involving a human and a human-centric agent. Method: The collaborative task was selected based on commonly performed tasks in a therapeutic healthcare context. It involved planning activities for the upcoming week to achieve health-related goals. A calendar application served as a tool for this task. This application embedded a collaborative agent designed to interact with humans following Tuckman's stages of team development. Eight participants completed the collaborative calendar planning task, followed by a semi-structured interview. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using inductive content analysis. Results: The results revealed that the participants initiated the storming stage in most cases (n=7/8) and that the agent initiated the norming stage in most cases (n=5/8). Additionally, three main categories emerged from the content analyses of the interviews related to participants’ transition through team development stages: i) participants' experiences of Tuckman's first three stages of team development; ii) their reactions to the agent's behavior in the three stages; and iii) factors important to the participants to team up with a collaborative agent. Conclusion: Results suggest ways to further personalize the agent to contribute to human-agent teamwork. In addition, this study revealed the need to further examine the integration of explicit conflict management into human-agent collaboration for human-agent teamwork.

    Keywords: Human-agent teaming, human-AI collaboration, Tuckman's model, human-centered AI, Activity Theory, Health Promotion, Activities of Daily Living

    Received: 27 Jun 2024; Accepted: 28 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Kaelin, Tewari, Benouar and Lindgren. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Vera C. Kaelin, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
    Maitreyee Tewari, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.