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Information Technology News The truth is out there - but not in your emails.
Information Technology News The truth is out there - but not in your emails. | The truth is out there - but not in your emails. |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Friday, 26 September 2008 | |
  
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"There is a growing concern in the workplace over e-mail communications, and it comes down to trust," according to Liuba Belkin, an assistant professor of management at Lehigh University, who co-authored the paper - "Being Honest Online: The Finer Points of Lying in Online Ultimatum Bargaining." - along with Terri Kurtzberg of Rutgers University and Charles Naquin of DePaul University. Kurtzberg added: "[Our] findings are consistent with our other work that shows that e-mail communication decreases the amount of trust and cooperation we see in professional group-works...as opposed to pen-and-paper systems. People seem to feel more justified in acting in self-serving ways when typing as opposed to writing." The researchers cite two examples of experiments that they claim confirm their findings. However in the announcement of their findings they do not discuss the fact that lying in a scientific experiment is 'consequence free' as opposed to lying in a corporate communication which could result in a range of retributions ranging from a dressing down to the sack, or worse. In one study, the researchers handed full-time MBA students $89 each and told them to give some to an other, fictional, person who knew only that they would get somewhere between $5 and $100, and had to accept whatever money was offered. Using either e-mail or pen-and-paper communications, each MBA student reported the size of their pot and how much the other person would get. The researchers found that more than 92 percent of students using e-mail lied about the amount of money to be divided while less then 64 percent lied about the pot size when communicating with pen an paper. What's more the emailers were much more parsimonious in how much they were prepared to give the other person: on average handing over just $29 after portraying the total pot as, on average, containing $56. Pen-and-paper students passed along an average of almost $34 out of a misrepresented pot of, on average, about $67. Not surprisingly the researchers found that "a shared sense of identity reduces an e-mailer's impulse to lie": the more familiar e-mailers are with each other, the less deceptive their lies would be. But, they concluded "people would still lie, regardless of how well they identified with each other." They remind us that corporate use of email dates back only to 1994, (and widespread usage came a few years later) and they conclude that: "The study of industrial psychology and the evolving use of email are presenting some interesting challenges for organisations across the board...We know it's a socially acceptable way to communicate, but how that translates in the workplace is a different story entirely." Belkin suggests one explanation for th phenomenon as being that "You're not afforded the luxury of seeing non-verbal and behavioural cues over e-mail, and in an organisational context, that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and, as we saw in our study, intentional deception." Maybe videomails are the answer. |
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