Beyond Words: Non-Verbal Cues in Virtual Collaborations

Abstract

Virtual communication has become commonplace, especially for geographically dispersed teams collaborating on joint projects despite lacking prior relationships. These teams will likely encounter coordination failures, resulting in low overall cooperation rates. Our study addresses this challenge by implementing a weakest-link game in a controlled large-scale online experiment on Prolific. We aimed to investigate if and how non-verbal cues in virtual team meetings can foster collaboration. Before playing the weakest-link game, team members participated in a virtual team meeting to get acquainted. This interaction set the stage for subsequent collaboration. We systematically varied the availability and amount of non-verbal cues between our treatments. We expected these cues to be crucial in overcoming strategic uncertainty and fostering group cohesion. Depending on the treatment, the virtual team meeting was an audio-only meeting, an audio meeting with photos of the other team members’ faces, or a video meeting. We observe significantly higher cooperation in the audio-only and the video meeting than in the audio meeting enriched with photos. Static non-verbal cues, thus, had a negative effect on team cooperation. We find that the audio-only and the video meeting lead to similar team cooperation and that coordination did not differ between treatments. Our findings shed light on how virtual teams can enhance their collaboration by leveraging the power of non-verbal cues.