Workzone: E-mail isn't the way to build trust at work
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E-mail is a quick and convenient way to convey information.
It is not, however, a great way to build trust and confidence among co-workers collaborating for the first time, researchers say, and it can actually hurt both work relationships and productivity.
Kevin W. Rockmann of George Mason University and Gregory B. Northcraft of the University of Illinois set up an experiment using 232 undergraduates in which different groups had to decide if they should take aggressive action against other groups, whether out of motives of altruism or self-preservation. The study was published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
What they found was that groups who met face to face were more trusting and less likely to attack than groups that negotiated by e-mail. Those who used teleconferences fell somewhere between.
What Drs. Rockmann and Northcraft wanted to learn was how and why this happens. Part of it is the push and tug of the workplace, as people ponder how much they should cooperate with fellow workers they don't know well and to what degree they must compete with them, the authors say.
Meeting face to face, people can assess how much they trust the other party based on facial expressions, tone of voice and other visual cues, said Dr. Rockmann. Those indicators also make it harder for the other side to deceive. A liar's nervous tick or unwillingness to make eye contact can set off alarms in person, but that won't be detected in e-mail.
Another ingredient that comes into play, they found, is that e-mail gives the writer a greater sense of anonymity, which doesn't always bring out a person's best side. "Although computer-mediated and video-mediated interaction are not necessarily anonymous, in the short term they are less personalized," than face-to-face encounters, Drs. Rockmann and Northcraft write.
First Published July 12, 2010 12:00 am
