Leveraging Affective Friction to Improve Online Creative Collaboration: An Experimental Design

Emotional contagion is a pillar of social interaction. As such, it has immense potential to facilitate communication and improve collaboration. In the context of remote collaboration, it is especially important that working partners can build trust and a sense of cohesiveness. While digital media may complicate socio-affective communication, we argue that some media capabilities are better able to support processes of affective alignment. We define affective friction as an affective misalignment between the members of a workgroup that may result in diverging affective responses to shared experiences. We propose that affective friction is a central element of affective alignment and a driving force of creative collaboration. As a result, the capacity of a medium to make affective friction perceptible to working partners is essential for successful remote collaboration. We suggest a two-stage experimental design to test our hypotheses.