Facilitating Team Processes with Recommender Systems: A Behavioral Science Perspective

This position paper argues that recommender systems should be considered as fully automated facilitators having positive impact on team processes and consequently on team effectiveness. The paper builds upon the general organizational need to improve teams' processes to enhance and sustain team effectiveness. However, current research on facilitation is little synthesized across research disciplines and typically focuses on the end-product of collaboration rather than on the team process itself when assessing team effectiveness. This paper puts forward the idea that today's recommender systems, or more specifically, their recommendations, already provide content facilitation and technical facilitation, respectively. Little is known about their theoretical grounding in behavioral sciences a well as the impact of recommendations on team processes. A research agenda is presented in the form of a discussion.