In small office chat app5/17/2023 ![]() For instance, the VHs with the small talk ability would ask the users some simple questions to make small talk or remind the users of their belongings. The users were able to engage in natural speech-based conversation in a predefined corpus of small talk content that covered various commonplace small talk topics such as conversations about the weather, general concerns, and entertainment based on similar real-life situations. Users were tasked with collecting items in a virtual marketplace via natural speech-based dialogue with a crowd of virtual pedestrians and vendors. In this contribution, we empirically investigated the effect of small talk on the users' non-verbal behaviors and emotions when users interacted with a crowd of virtual humans (VHs) with positive behavioral dispositions. Combined, results suggest that the polite, ritualistic, and formulaic nature of small talk is often uplifting yet also distracting. Our results also showed higher levels of trait-level self-monitoring mitigated the negative effects of small talk on work engagement. Using multilevel path analysis, our results showed that, on one hand, small talk enhanced employees’ daily positive social emotions at work, which translated into heightened organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) and greater well-being at the end of the workday on the other hand, small talk disrupted employees’ ability to cognitively engage in their work, which compromised their OCB. Given that we are the first to examine small talk as an episodic phenomenon, we also conducted a scale validation of our daily small talk measure with Masters students from a University in the Northeastern US (n = 73) and two samples of employed adults registered with Amazon Mechanical Turk (n = 180 and n = 202). In a sample of employed adults recruited from a Northeast US University’s alumni database and LinkedIn (n = 151), we used an experience sampling method (ESM) to capture within-individual variation in small talk over a three-week period. Integrating theories of interaction rituals and micro-role transitions, we explore how and why seemingly inconsequential conversations during the workday generate meaningful effects on employees’ experiences. Yet, emerging research suggests small talk may have important consequences for employees. Although small talk comprises up to one-third of adults’ speech, its effects in the workplace have been largely discounted. Small talk-short, superficial, or trivial communication not core to task completion-is normative and ubiquitous in organizational life.
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