Media Affectivity: Theorizing the Role of Digital Media Capabilities in Aligning Team Members’ Affective States

The recent shift toward digital workplaces and online collaboration highlighted the important, yet often overlooked, implications of affective processes among digitally connected team members. To understand and empathize with one another, team members must often find a way to improve their “affective alignment”—that is, the degree to which each team member’s affective state is responsive to the affective states of others in the team. In this article, we propose a new theoretical framework: media affectivity, which posits that a medium’s affective channels, affective representations, and affective inflection enable and constrain the emergence of affective alignment in teams. Media affectivity helps to understand why teams may feel more or less connected when using different digital media, even when the communicated information is complete, accurate, and mutually understood. Media affectivity further challenges some of our existing assumptions about digital media, including what it means to be “co-located”, what it means to be “synchronous”, and what it means for media to be “embodied”. At a deeper level, media affectivity highlights the need to consider how digital media impact team members’ affective alignment, not only to explain cognition and decision making, but because affective alignment is itself a valuable outcome