Emotions in collaborative networks: A monitoring system

Abstract

In the last years the rapid progress of ICT along with the growing business models have led to the emergence of a large variety of collaborative networks. Collaboration brought new achievements such as the capacity of the involved entities getting into business in a sustainable and stable way. Despite the fact that collaboration has significant benefits, especially in creating value and boosting innovation, some studies indicate that most of them tend to fail. Among others, the lack of specific systems to monitor the emotional state of the network is one of the reasons why collaboration fails. Emotions can interfere in collaboration environments by increasing or decreasing the motivation and performance level and even in conflict resolutions. Therefore, it becomes particularly necessary to find means for supervising the emotional state of collaborative networks in order to achieve the equilibrium for a healthy community. This paper introduces an approach to develop an emotions-oriented system and presents two scenario cases of collaborative networks where this system can be implemented. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.