Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Electronic performance appraisals: The effects of e-mail communication on peer ratings in actual and simulated environments
Section snippets
Theoretical perspectives comparing communication media
Much previous work, dominated by Media Richness Theory (see Daft & Lengel, 1986) has focused on communication media tools and has compared their features and capabilities. Generally, these studies conclude that face-to-face communication should be more comprehensive than voice-only communication (such as communicating via telephone), which should in turn be more comprehensive than text-only communication such as either paper-text letters or e-mail (considered equivalent by these theories),
E-Mail versus paper-based performance appraisals
Research on how e-mail appraisals compare to face-to-face interaction has revealed distinct differences; unfortunately, the research comparing e-mail appraisals to other written forms (i.e., the focus of the presented research) is limited, and conclusions are mixed at best. A wealth of previous research has demonstrated that people tend to give more negative appraisals when communicating in a computer mediated mode than when communicating face-to-face (Herbert and Vorauer, 2003, Siegel et al.,
Study 1 method
Participants were 73 fulltime graduate level business students who completed the study as part of a class assignment. All participants were informed that they were to provide a performance review evaluating each of their teammates’ performance during a simulated negotiation. The experimental design had one manipulation—they either completed their performance review on-line via e-mail (n = 36) or by traditional paper-form (n = 37). All participants were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions.
Study 3
Two items of concern remained based on the methods employed by the first two studies, so an entirely new design was implemented as Study 3. First, in Studies 1 and 2, we did not actually know where the participants completed the appraisal task, and so the online-versus-paper context may have spuriously overlapped with anonymity in the study as it was executed, as a function of location. In other words, if it was the case that those in the e-mail condition systematically filled out their forms
General discussion
The three studies presented a clear pattern of results suggesting that the communication media used for performance appraisals of peers does indeed matter. Specifically, e-mail seemed to result in more negative ratings overall, as well as a lessened sense of social obligation, than did paper-form ratings. In demonstrating this, we contribute empirical evidence to a small but growing stream of literature that describes the potential differences resulting from the use of various communication
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