Effects of E-Mail on the Organization

European Management Journal Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 18–30, 1998 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reservedPergamon

Printed in Great Britain0263-2373/98 $19.00 + 0.00PII: S0263-2373(97)00070-4

Effects of E-Mail on theOrganizationWILLIAM LUCAS, International Center for Research on the Management of Technology,Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The objective of this article is to enable managersbetter to understand the current nature and futurepotential of e-mail communication in organizationsand some of the associated social processes. Follow-ing a review, William Lucas examines the direct andsecondary benefits of e-mail on organizationalefficiency, which are enhanced as more and moreemployees are given e-mail capability. His analysiscombines research literature, case studies and sur-vey data, and a major conclusion highlights mana-gerial compromises which may be necessary whene-mail communication encourages the flow of infor-mation in organizations outside formally-author-ized channels. 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. Allrights reserved

European Management Journal Vol 16 No 1 February 199818

Introduction

The purpose of this review is to explore what isknown about e-mail and its effects on the organiza-tion. The hope is that it will help managers betterunderstand some of the social processes that are asso-ciated with e-mail, and anticipate future changes thatadoption and deployment of that technology willbring. The discussion begins by examining what isknown about the nature of e-mail, with an emphasison e-mail’s social components and how they affectthe way electronic messaging is used. The reviewreports on the direct benefits of e-mail for organiza-tional efficiency, leading to the conclusion that thegains in saving employee time coupled with the lowcosts of messaging generally make a persuasive casefor e-mail as a cost-effective form of communication.The focus then turns to secondary organizationaleffects of e-mail, including how e-mail changes theflow of interpersonal information, making communi-cation easier and involving more employees inorganization processes. A consideration of the aggre-gate effects of having a large critical mass of e-mailusers finds that these benefits are substantiallyheightened as more employees are given e-mail capa-bility. The conclusion then identifies some manage-ment compromises that may be required when e-mailis adopted as a basic communication utility, leadingto subtle but important shifts in how formal organi-zation authority is exercised.

Discussion of the value of e-mail is often based onself-reported behavior or subjective judgments madeby individuals about their firms, not the strongestform of evidence. The approach here is to combineresearch literature reporting on controlled experi-ments and in-depth case studies with results of self-report survey data to look for convergent con-clusions. The focus is on e-mail used for interpersonalcommunications, the process of two or more peoplecommunicating electronically with text-based media.Consideration of the broader concept of messaging,including electronic forms, workgroup communi-cation systems, electronic data interchange or other

EFFECTS OF E-MAIL ON THE ORGANIZATION

person-to-application and application-to-applicationcommunications is outside the scope of this effort.

Social and Technical Components of E-Mail

E-mail is a socio-technical system, consisting both of(1) technology formed of silicon, copper, software,training, helpdesks and industry standards and prac-tices, and (2) social and psychological factors thatshape individual use, including social practices andnorms governing user behavior (Cherns, 1976; Biksonand Eveland, 1986.) When managers purchase andoperate e-mail systems, they tend to focus on thetechnical features and functions that are supported.It is equally important to understand how socialnorms and practices surrounding e-mail determinethe way that technology is used, and how they shapethe nature of the benefits an organization can expectfrom relying more heavily on e-mail.

Technical Features of Messaging Systems

E-mail generally has several inherent technicalcharacteristics. E-mail is relatively fast; it is an asyn-chronous, store-and-forward system; it can be both apoint-to-point and broadcast medium; and it trans-mits electronic text. Each of these characteristics pro-vides opportunity for efficiencies and long termbenefits.

By asynchronous, one means that the sender andreceiver do not have to be involved in the communi-cations link at the same time. E-mail like other asyn-chronous media is less disruptive than the telephoneand face-to-face meetings, and need not interrupt theflow of an individual’s work. Another advantage isthat e-mail can cut down on time lost playing thetime-consuming and distracting game of ‘telephonetag’ when busy managers keep returning calls to oneanother until both are at their desks at the same time,and neither is on the telephone or in a meeting. Inaddition, fast ‘store and forward’ communicationsare particularly useful when sender and receiverhave different working hours, whether that is causedby differences in work shifts or by the spread ofemployees across international time zones. Of coursepart of the historical strength of earlier asynchronouscommunications — fax and telex — in internationalcommerce was similarly due to their value in bridg-ing time as well as distance.

Point-to-point and Broadcast. While e-mail is oftenpoint-to-point between two users, broadcast mailenables the sender to spread information through anorganization rapidly and reliably at a very low cost.Queries can be sent out to raise awareness of prob-lems and search for solutions, to find experts and to

European Management Journal Vol 16 No 1 February 1998 19

enlist help in finding isolated knowledge about cus-tomers, specialized technical subjects, best practices,and other key information. The broadcast use of mes-saging is both a strength and a source of its greatestweakness: unwanted or ‘junk’ e-mail.

Electronic text is quite different than words printedon paper. To the user, both may be words to be read,but electronic content can be created, edited, trans-mitted, received and archived on the personal com-puter, enabling many practical economies. Cutting afew paragraphs out of an existing report or letter inyour word processing file and pasting them into aletter saves time, and is much easier than typing anew summary. Groups can assign sections of largeproposals to individuals at scattered locations, anduse e-mail to receive material that is then integratedby a word processor into a final document. The elec-tronic aspect of messaging and the concomitantability to integrate e-mail, word processing, andother computer applications may be far moreimportant than speed of transmission when compar-ing e-mail to paper media for organizational com-munications.

Social Components of Messaging

E-mail is also different from other media in social aswell as technical characteristics. It is used in waysdifferent from the telephone, face-to-face meetingsand paper documents that are as important a part ofe-mail as the computers and software.

Informal versus Formal. A key social dimension ofe-mail is its relative formality. It may help to thinkabout e-mail’s social characteristics by recognizingthat different media can have varied forms or genre(Yates and Orlikowski, 1992.) The original form of e-mail established at its inception was the memo,which led to its structure with a ‘To:’, ‘From:’, and‘Subject:’. Time and practice have led the original e-mail memo to take on an almost infinite variety ofgenre (Spooner and Yancey, 1996), allowing it toserve whatever communication needs the sendermay have. Consider a formal memorandum aboutcompany procedures that is sent out as e-mail. Sucha memorandum would still have the advantages ofbeing asynchronous, more rapidly delivered, andeasy to forward, respond to and store, but for theuser a formal electronic memorandum would still bealmost indistinguishable from a paper document.The innovative effects of e-mail are, however, moreoften associated with informal, interpersonal com-munication. At the extreme of informality, an e-mailmessage looks more like a quickly written note that,if it were on paper, might be attached to a colleague’scomputer monitor.

E-mail’s informal nature flows in-part from its his-tory. The culture of computer rooms, research labora-tories and universities where messaging began seems

E-mail eases internal

communications for those

working in foreign

languages


to have carried over into the use of e-mail on earlyon-line services like CompuServe. In the early 1980s,there was a major project to standardize an evolvingcomputer program language, and at the time nearly2000 messages were archived. The project involved awide variety of individuals in many different organi-zations scattered across the United States, but allwere regular users of e-mail. Despite the formal nat-ure of the task, proposing and debating technicalstandards, in a sample of the messages analyzed byOrlikowski and Yates (1994), two thirds (66.3%) ofthe sample messages had informal content and/orcolloquial language.

This informality has now carried over into thebroader culture of the Internet (King et al., 1997.)Today e-mail continues to carry with it social normsthat permit senders to relax the formal rules of writ-ten business communications. Representative mess-ages written by senior executives, professionals andadministrative personnel alikereported on in the literatureinclude poorly formed para-graphs, incomplete sentences,and misspelled words (e.g.,Sproull and Kiesler, 1986; Orli-kowski and Yates, 1994;Walther, 1992.) In an experi-mental study of paper and e-mail messages, Lea and Spears(1992) found that messages from strangers with mis-spelled words and typing mistakes made a negativeimpression on readers. When experienced and noviceusers of messaging were compared, however, experi-enced e-mail users were significantly less likely tomake critical judgments about the senders. Where e-mail is accepted as a very informal medium for com-munications between people who know each other,this tolerance appears to be even stronger, enablingthe sender to compose a message with less time spentworrying about grammar (Yates and Orlikowski,1992) and often little or no time proof-reading andre-writing.

This informal view of message writing may be parti-cularly useful in multi-lingual environments. Thesame acceptance of error applies to those who arewriting in a second language. In one study of multi-cultural project teams, e-mail was valued over thetelephone because it was easier to read and write ina second language than to engage in conversation(McDonough and Kahn, 1996.) This e-mail advantageis greater if in addition senders know that errors inwhat is not their native language will be received lesscritically than if they were on traditional paper docu-ments. It follows that the informal culture of e-mailshould be expected to facilitate its acceptance ininternational business communication, except whereorganizational and national cultures are too formalto take advantage of this cultural characteristic ofthe technology.

Lean versus Rich Media. Face-to-face communi-


cation is generally viewed as a rich source of socialcues, with the visual and audio communications thatinclude tone of voice, facial expression, body pos-ition, seating patterns and many other factors. Acommon critique of e-mail has been that it lacks this‘richness,’ and therefore does not have the capacityto convey complexity and the social context of thecommunications (Daft et al., 1987.) In their review ofresearch in this area, Schmitz and Fulk (1991) noteseveral studies where e-mail is consistently rankedas ‘less rich’ than face-to-face meetings. These resultshave led some to argue that e-mail therefore is lessadequate for some types of important managerialcommunications, and better managers will learn toavoid using e-mail for more complex or not welldefined tasks. (Short et al., 1976.)

Others have noted that e-mail is used flexibly andcreatively to convey a surprising level of emotionalcontent. The relative absence of formal rules for its

use permit the writers of e-mailto compose messages that useform, vocabulary, abbrevi-ations, professional jargon,organizational references andother techniques to convey animage of the sender and comp-lement the direct meaning ofthe text. (Walther, 1992.)Walther and others argue that

e-mail may be less useful for social content in a shortperiod of time, but the reiterative and easy nature ofe-mail communications over a sustained period oftime can make up much of any media difference thatmight exist. (Walther et al., 1994.)

Field work supports those believing that the absenceof richness is not a serious constraint for most usersof e-mail. Studies have found that managers, who areassumed to need to communicate about complex andambiguous tasks, are as likely to use e-mail as otheremployees. In a study in-depth of an organization inthe risk management industry, Markus (1994) col-lected 371 management interviews, asking abouttheir views of different media. The results showeda strong preference for messaging for most routinecommunications. E-mail was judged the best mediafor communicating about small things regardless ofdistance (even if people are close at hand), suggestingit is the most convenient media. It was preferred forkeeping people informed, for broadcasting infor-mation, and as a follow-up tool. Somewhat more sur-prising, e-mail was preferred to face-to-face in othercircumstances: a paper memo and e-mail wereranked above personal communications for showingauthority. E-mail and the telephone were ranked ofequal value for explaining something complex tosomeone far away. Face-to-face communications wasonly consistently preferred if there was a strongemotional and personal content involved. (Table 1.)

In general, e-mail was judged as, ‘appropriate for allwork-related communication, except for personnel


Table 1 Media Preferences for Different Types of Organizational Communications

Face-to-face Telephone E-mail Memo

To communicate the 2.2% 1.4% 82.4% 14.1%same thing to manypeople

To follow-up earlier - 5.2% 90.9% 3.8%communication

To keep someone 0.8% 2.2% 92.1% 4.9%informed

To communicate 35.6% 10.7% 46.0% 7.8%something of littleimportance to someoneclose by

When you want to show 23.8% 6.0% 32.8% 37.4%authority, status, position

To communicate 2.2% 42.9% 42.6% 12.3%something complicatedto someone far away

To convey confidential, 69.6% 20.7% 6.5% 3.2%private or delicateinformation

To influence, persuade 69.6% 9.9% 14.0% 6.5%or sell an idea

To express feelings or 69.1% 22.9% 6.6% 1.4%emotions

Adapted from Markus, 1994, p. 512

matters, which were either confidential and could notbe entrusted to e-mail or required delicate handlingof the other person’s emotions. This definition of e-mail encompassed even highly equivocal tasks, suchas strategy formulation...’ (Markus, 1994p. 520,emphasis in the original.) Nor does this work standalone as others have also found that managers use e-mail to the same extent as other employees, question-ing again the idea that e-mail is not useful for peopleinvolved in equivocal or complex tasks (Rice andShook, 1990.)

E-mail may be less rich than face-to-face contact, andthere are certainly occasions when it should not bethe preferred medium, but as will be discussed belowthere are many compensating mechanisms that helpit serve as an effective medium for a very large pro-portion of communication tasks.

Cost Reduction, Speed, and Productivity

The value of e-mail is determined by the combinedeffects of these social and technical characteristics,and a first step is to look for cost savings and pro-ductivity gains. When companies installed the earlye-mail systems, they often justified their investmentin terms of expected direct cost savings and improve-


ments in efficiency. Research found some cost sav-ings, particularly relative to the telephone, buttended to concentrate more on the role of e-mail inmaking individuals more productive by saving timeand effort, and by accelerating the flow of infor-mation and speeding organizational processes (Riceand Bair, 1984; Sproull and Kiesler, 1986.)

Now that organizations have extensive experience tobase judgments on about e-mail, there seems to begeneral agreement that there are indeed direct bene-fits in productivity. In 1994, the Louis Harris pollingorganization interviewed over 500 chief informationofficers, directors of management information sys-tems, and others involved with messaging systemsabout the effects that e-mail was having on theirorganizations (Louis Harris and Associates, 1995.)Included in the interviews were a representative sam-ple of 404 managers in the Fortune 2000, constitutinga broad and representative cross-section of U.S.industry; and a hundred managers in Federal andstate government agencies.1 The Harris survey wasthen adapted and given in 1996 to an opportunisticsample of managers in the Lotus Gold program, atechnical program supported by the Lotus Develop-ment European Corporation. Responses were col-lected from 65 European organizations, again drawnfrom both industry and government.2


Displacing Costs and Saving Time. One potentialgain is the cost savings that might occur if e-mail sub-stitutes for more expensive media. The Harris surveyasked about manager perceptions of any changes inthe use of voice mail, fax, and surface mail that hascome about as a result of the use of e-mail. All wereseen as having decreased as e-mail replaced the othermedia to some degree, with the greater effects foundfor surface mail. Two thirds of the managers in theU.S. and 70% of those in the European sample feltthat the use of surface mail had declined due to e-mail growth. (See Table 2.)

One should stress, however, that this finding doesnot mean that telephone, fax and other costs aregoing down as a result of e-mail. The ease of e-mailcommunications increases the total number of com-munications and broadens the number of people thatwork together (see below), and these in turn generatethe need for some telephone calls and fax trans-missions that might not have ever occurred. In astudy of media usage, Kraut and Attewell (1997)found that the use of e-mail correlated with the useof other media, suggesting that heavy communi-cators are more likely to use all media more often. E-mail may save some costs when it is used to substi-tute for other communications, but it may or may notalso increase costs by stimulating new relationshipsand more communications traffic in total.

This mixed view of the cost impact of messaging isreflected in the divided views of managers in the U.S.and Europe. Many were responsible for the tele-phone, fax and voice mail operations, and sawoperating expense reports of their organizations.When asked if costs had gone up or down as a resultof messaging, 22% of responding managers in Eur-ope felt e-mail had driven the cost of communi-cations up, 27% felt costs had gone down, and thelargest group said they did not know or there hadbeen no change. In the U.S., there was more feelingthat costs had gone down, but of these most felt thatany decreases were ‘slight’ (Table 3.)

Table 2 Substitution Effects of E-Mail* (1995 Louis Harris Survey and Lotus Gold Program Respondents)

Europe U.S.

Effect of e-mail on voice mail Decrease 63.9% 34.8%No change, don’t know 36.1% 65.2%

Effect of e-mail on fax Decrease 28.6% 46.2%No change, don’t know 72.4% 53.8%

Effect of e-mail on surface mail Decrease 70.5% 65.2%No change, don’t know 29.5% 34.8%

*Unfortunately the Harris survey did not ask about impact on telephone use. The survey did ask if responding managers had directresponsibility in their organizations for each of these different functions. Assuming that managers with responsibility for each areawould be familiar with the relevant operating budgets, we used that to see if views differed based on their organizational roles.No meaningful differences were found. For example, 62.5% of U.S. managers with responsibility for fax felt that e-mail haddecreased fax use, compared to 64.1% of those without responsibility for fax in their organizations who saw a decrease


In speaking to e-mail users, savings in personneltime, not direct communications costs, seem moreimportant. A study of e-mail effects at British Tele-com is interesting because it gives us some insightinto which of e-mail’s functions seems to be mostimportant in time-saving (sigma, 1997). As part of abroader study of office automation, sigma collecteddata on the benefits derived from e-mail use by 61users in various BT departments, including finance,marketing, customer service, supply and humanresources. They were experienced users of messag-ing, and the median of their estimated usage was(summing both sent and received) 113.4 messages aweek, or 23 sent and received each day. One questionwas had they benefited considerably, slightly or notat all from the use of ‘e-mail and attached files’ inseven areas (See Table 43.) While the results weregenerally positive for all seven areas, it was clear thattime savings through the use of e-mail for copyingand distributing information, and improving thequality of documents were the most important fac-tors, followed by getting faster responses back fromothers. The least time savings were found in pro-cessing mail, presumably because the price of theother time savings is the burden of sending andreceiving the e-mail itself. These data confirm inparticular the central importance of the electronicnature of e-mail and its capacity to be integrated withword processing and other applications.

Justifying an E-Mail Investment

E-mail is generally thought of as saving time, andthis view is often linked with the low costs of e-mailto generate an intuitive business case for e-mailinvestment. Whether or not an actual financial caseis constructed, the first assumption is that e-mail ishighly cost-effective, and per message costs are low.Such an assumption is occasionally confirmed by iso-lated studies. For example, Harkins (1996) presenteda cost analysis to the Electronic Messaging Associ-


Table 3 Management Views of Cost Benefits of E-Mail (1995 Louis Harris Survey and Lotus Gold ProgramRespondents*)

Cost Impact of E-Mail on Organizational Communication Europe U.S.

Cost of communications Increased Greatly or Slightly 22.2% 28.2%No change, don’t know 50.8% 25.7%**Decreased Greatly or Slightly 27.0% 45.8%

100.0% 100.0%

* For the purpose of reporting responses on substitution effects in Table 2 and cost impacts in Table 3, the responding managersgenerally have access to objective traffic and budgetary data and are treated here as knowledgeable experts. There remains thepotential problem that the respondents share a systematic bias in their views of e-mail benefits, which is addressed below in thecontext of their replies to more subjective questions** In the U.S., 3.6% saw a great increase, 24.9% a slight increase, 37.0% aslight decrease, and 8.7% a great increase. The forced choice nature of the question as it was asked in the U.S. telephone surveyalso under-estimated those seeing no change in communications costs

Table 4 Benefits of E-Mail and Attached Files at British Telecom3

"Indicate to what extent the Not at all Slightly Considerablyfollowing benefits have beenachieved:"

Time saved copying and 3.5% 8.8% 87.7%distributing

Time saved trying to contact 5.3% 42.1% 52.6%people by phone

Time saved faxing 19.3% 24.6% 56.1%

Time saved re-typing or re- 14.0% 33.3% 52.6%inputting data

Time saved processing your 15.8% 47.4% 36.8%mail

Faster responses 7.1% 30.4% 62.5%

Improved quality of documents 3.5% 12.3% 84.2%sent/received

ation that brought together servers, routers and othernetwork hardware costs, software purchases andmaintenance fees, and the labor costs for post officeadministration, helpdesks, network maintenance andother factors. The final cost estimate of e-mail serviceper user for 20,000 users at Intel was $US 218.00 peryear for 1994 and $US 223.00 in 1995. The 1995 sys-tem carried somewhat more traffic, so the cost permessage both years was $US 0.04. Some costs runhigher in Europe and for international networks ingeneral, and smaller e-mail systems lack the econom-ies of scale that can be taken advantage of at Intel.However, the hundreds of e-mail managers from theU.S. and elsewhere who listened to the Intel presen-tation seemed to believe that these estimates werewell within a range of reasonable costs.4

With costs assumed or confirmed to be at this generallevel, the next step is to place a reasonable value onemployee time, and base a successful case for e-mailinvestment on the argument that e-mail saves the


average user a few minutes a day. In the BT studyreferenced above, the final conclusion was e-mailsaved the organization a median of 3.5 hours per userevery week which, based on BT salaries and benefits,led to a saving estimate of over £UK 9000 a year foran average employee (sigma, 1997). Estimates of sav-ings are rarely this aggressive, in part because theydo not need to be. If an organization can argue thatthe average e-mail user saves even 10 to 15 minutesa day, the financial case for e-mail is relatively easyto make.

Increasingly, however, e-mail does not have to be jus-tified based on direct benefits. E-mail is becomingmission-critical, an essential tool in the organization’scommunications processes. In the words of one cor-poration messaging manager:

E-mail is cheaper than other media, and it saves a lot oftime and money. But that doesn’t matter any more becausepeople are so dependent on it. It is the single most

Organizational

communications are made

easier, faster and more

efficient by E-mail


important application at [XYZ] oil company. Not every-body does word processing or other things, but they all doe-mail. If it goes down, people scream... murder becausethey can’t do their jobs.5

So now that e-mail has direct productivity benefitsand it is an essential business tool, organizationsmust deploy e-mail systems. Are there any furtherconsequences for the organization if it adopts e-mailas a major communications system?

Beyond Productivity: SecondaryOrganizational Effects

An important work on messaging uses a basic dis-tinction between first-order and secondary effects ofe-mail. In their book Connections, Sproull andKiesler (1991) write that while those installing mes-saging systems tend to focus on the communicationsefficiency effects of messaging, secondary effects andunintended consequences may be more important.

Lower Social Presence and Egalitarian Behavior

As noted above, one school of thought holds thatsocial cues are not as evident in e-mail, removingsome of the inhibitions to particular kinds of com-munications. While variousconsequences can follow fromthis absence of ‘social pres-ence,’ one of the mostimportant is on its effects onequalizing employee contri-butions to the organization’sinformation flow.

The research has consistentlyseen that computer-mediatedcommunications is associated with more equitableparticipation. Early work showed that when face-to-face groups were compared with those using tele-conferencing to interact, there was more balance:individuals exchanging text messages were morelikely to contribute equally, and less likely to bedominated by a few individuals (Chapanis, 1978.)Sproull and Kiesler (1986) found some evidence thatemployees were somewhat more likely to use e-mailto communicate with their boss than they were withtheir secretaries, and then and later concluded thate-mail results in some ‘status equalization,’ makingusers less aware of differences in social status andless concerned about social pressures that inhibitvarious kinds of behavior (Sproull and Kiesler, 1986,1991, page 13.) In a review of the history of the ori-gins of Internet and early e-mail, King, Grinter andPickering note that social principles were establishedby the academic and defense research communitiesthat stressed ‘informal meritocracy as the core per-formance evaluation mechanism; and a presumption


of egalitarianism,’ that meant the status of the senderwas less important that the substance (1997, page 14.)

A particular importance of this phenomena is that e-mail seems to increase the flow of unwelcome andother information that might otherwise be delayed orlost. That is, e-mail users will be less aware of therecipient’s status, and be more comfortable using e-mail to communicate negative information to theirmanagement. Employees may be unwilling toexpress divergent or points of view in a face-to-facemeeting with an aggressive boss and verbal and com-petitive colleagues, but might offer useful infor-mation later. Individuals wanting to avoid interper-sonal conflict, those wanting to research a questionto be sure before expressing an opinion, and thoseuncomfortable with the national language of themeeting are examples of other cases when e-mailmight be important in collecting useful informationthat might otherwise not be offered.

Incremental Information and Low IntensityRelationships

Not all e-mail systems are alike, and cumbersomeand difficult to learn systems are still in place. Wheregood messaging interfaces are installed, the usershave click and send icons for Reply and Forward,directories with nicknames to eliminate remembering

and typing complex addresses,and e-mail address lists. Thistechnical ease of use is sup-ported by an informal e-mailculture that allows quicklycomposed messages thatfurther reduces the risk andeffort involved in sending e-mail. It would appear that e-mail can substantially lower thethreshold for the individual to

communicate, with a major consequence for organi-zational communication patterns. E-mail users arelikely to send more messages, sending out infor-mation they might not have otherwise sent, and toestablish new relationships with a wider variety ofindividuals.

One study of e-mail a large computer firm providesshows how these factors can facilitate informal com-munications, while illustrating the value of broadcastmessaging as a tool in reaching out to an organiza-tion’s resources for help. Constant et al. (1996)) moni-tored the corporate e-mail system, looking for broad-cast messages requesting information. During theperiod they sampled, they identified about 7 requestsa day, generally seeking technical information. Theythen collected the replies (just under 8 per request,)and surveyed those who had supplied them. Thoseproviding help spent an average of 9 minutes com-posing replies, and the net result was the responsessolved about half of the problems that led to the orig-


inal requests. E-mail here was serving as a tool tohelp relative strangers in the same organization, since81% did not know the person making the request,and another 10% only knew the person marginally.

E-mail also appears to contribute to the maintenanceof on-going interpersonal relationships in ways thatgo against the early findings that e-mail lackswarmth and social presence. Walther (1996) has heldthat under the right conditions e-mail’s lack of socialcues can in fact provide support for sustainingrelationships. Controlled experiments studying theeffects of computer-decision support systems andcomputer conferencing have found that, in absenceof abundant social cues, individuals will base opi-nions of others on what few social cues are available.When communicating individuals belong to the samegroup, a psychological tendency has been found forusers of computer-based media to fill the blanks witha somewhat idealized image of the sender that leadsto a positive view of others involved in the communi-cations process (Lea and Spears, 1992.) At the sametime, another phenomenon is that users control thoselimited social cues that are transmitted. Users learnto shape the social image that is projected, creatingvery positive views of themselves. Together thesepsychological forces, added to the low threshold forcommunicating, would predict that e-mail has anability to enable the establishment and maintenanceof much wider interpersonal networks.

This expectation is supported by field research. Feld-man (1987) argues that e-mail allows people withcommon interests to find one another more easilyand then continue to stay in touch. In a study of aFortune 500 office systems company, she found thatthe users of e-mail thought over half their messageswould not have been sent had it not been for e-mail.In addition to many messages flowing from the useof e-mail distribution lists, these ‘new’ messageexchanges occurred more often where the sendersand receivers only communicated electronically, andwere organizationally and geographically distant.The existence of these marginal but nonetheless realrelationships means that information is exchangedthat, before e-mail, would not have been sent. Simi-larly, more messages will be sent to other e-mailusers in existing relationships (Sproull and Kiesler,1986.)

One result of the growth of new and expandedrelationships based on e-mail is that a social changeoccurs in peripheral locations in the organization.Eveland and Bikson (1988) found that individualsaway from the organization center benefited substan-tially when the work of two taskforces with bothactive and retired employees were compared. In thegroup without e-mail, on-site employees used infor-mal face-to-face contact to dominate meetings; thetaskforce with e-mail led to a more open process withthe scattered retired employees outside the organiza-tion leading the effort. In a study of a major financial


corporation, Kraut and Attewell (1997) report that e-mail increased the total amount of communication,and that the peripheral employees — isolated bygeography, function or status — in an organizationbenefit greatly from this increase. They found thatperipheral employees who used e-mail more heavilywere also more knowledgeable about their organiza-tion, and were more supportive of its goals and man-agement than peripheral workers using e-mail lessoften. Related research (Huff et al., 1989) found thatthe heavier users of e-mail and bulletin boards hadhigher levels of organizational commitment, whenincreased use of telephone and paper communi-cations did not seem to have any effect on commit-ment. In their research on e-mail in a city govern-ment, the positive benefits were concentrated amongshift workers who were isolated from those whowork regular business hours. While one often thinksof e-mail in a context of knowledge workers and pro-fessional employees, some of the largest benefitsfrom deploying e-mail may be found among workersin less skilled jobs and away from the organizationcenter.

Junk E-Mail

Most observers agree that organizations using e-mailas a major means of organizational communicationsee large increases in communication traffic, but notall increases in information flows are beneficial. Witha low cost to sender to create messages, and with theease of adding copies to large lists of recipients, oneconsequence can be massive over-use of e-mail withunacceptable costs for the recipients who must investan hour or more every day processing all their mail.There is what the Internet community calls ‘spam,’unwanted and uninvited messages from advertisersand others inside and outside the organization. Thisproblem can often be managed to some degree byfilters on organizational gateways, and by sanc-tioning abuse of the e-mail system by employees. Themore intractable problem is created when employeesflood each other with scores of e-mail messages everyweek on what the senders consider valid companybusiness, but the recipients see as messages havingonly marginal value that they are nonetheless obli-gated to read.

One early study found that the introduction of e-mailcaused a net increase in time spent on communi-cations, a slight reduction in the use of other media,and an increase in the amount of time spent that wasnot interrupted (Tapscott, 1981.) Kraut and Attewell(1997) also provide an insight into the effect of e-mailgrowth by looking to see which form of communi-cations is considered the more disruptive. E-mail andfax, another asynchronous media, were seen as muchless intrusive causing less interruption of normalflow of business, particularly when compared tothe telephone.

Still the amount of e-mail is increasing, already caus-


ing serious problems in some organizations, and sol-utions are not immediately obvious. Technical sol-utions include the creation of software filters on e-mail boxes that screen out mail based on subjects,senders, whether the message is a copy or some otherfactor. Some organizations have operating policiesthat reserve a time of day for message handling, orprohibit messaging at other times. Another strategyhas been to assess per message fees, so that managersare forced to consider the volumes and costs of mes-saging in their groups. In at least one company, thisapproach seems to have caused a ‘dramatic falloff inthe total number of messages’ (Stuller, 1996 page 22.)Ultimately, however, the solution must be social. Asuser experience and maturity with the technologyincreases, management and the user community inan organization must develop norms to bring inap-propriate e-mail traffic within acceptable limits.Otherwise the same strength of e-mail as a low thres-hold media for interpersonal communication willbecome in turn the source of a serious negativeimpact on employee productivity.

Management Perspectives

The net effect of these technical and social character-istics of electronic messaging is that for most organi-zations e-mail has become an effective tool for oper-ations and corporate management. Similar resultswere found when we examine the views of the Harrisand Lotus Gold surveys. They were asked, ‘I’m goingto ask you about e-mail usage in your organization.Has ease of communications between employees in yourorganization increased a great deal, increasedslightly, or decreased a great deal?’, with the questionrepeated for areas of sharing and receiving infor-mation. These are experienced managers in the fieldof communications, but unlike the earlier questions,here they are making broad and difficult judgmentsnot anchored to budgets and traffic statistics. Onemight expect them to be somewhat biased in favorof the technologies they manage. So for them to saythat e-mail has ‘increased slightly’ the ease of com-munications is hardly a ringing vote of confidence.For that reason we focus on the respondents whoassert that the impact of e-mail has been to changetheir organization ‘a great deal.’ One might thenthink of these survey responses as a rough census ofwhat experienced managers believe with confidenceto be true about the value of messaging, whileremembering the speculative nature of the questions.

Focusing on the more confident responses, the man-agers believe what the research predicts: e-mail hasa major impact on the ease and speed of communi-cations inside the organization, it increases theamount of information sharing, and the flow of infor-mation now includes input from a broader range ofindividuals. The area where there is a lower level ofconfidence about e-mail’s benefits is its impact on


external communications. While European (58.7%)and U.S. (46.3%) respondents felt that the ease ofcommunications with employees had improved agreat deal, only 21% in Europe and 16.0% in the U.S.believed a similar improvement had occurred inexternal communications. Similar differences arefound when one compares speed of communicationsboth among European and U.S. respondents. Whilehalf of these organizations have Internet gateways,and most have that or some other forms of externale-mail interconnection, it appears that so far internalorganizational communications benefit more fromthe use of e-mail.

In light of the earlier discussion of the importance ofinformality and relaxed rules of composition with e-mail, it is interesting to note that e-mail is viewed bythe managers in these surveys as having had moreimpact in Europe. The U.S. and European samplesare not strictly comparable, and so the differencescould be attributable to many other factors. But theresults are at least consistent with what one wouldexpect if e-mail helps inter-personal communicationsin international environments by making individualsmore comfortable using a foreign language.

Critical Mass and E-Mail Effectiveness

These results of the Harris and Lotus Gold surveyseem to confirm the research in-depth: Messaging iseffective in the ease of moving information andbreadth of individual involvement. But how muche-mail is enough?

Use of e-mail can be started by being required by amajor customer, by a senior manager who insists onusing it, or by a general social trend, but use is some-times confined initially to isolated groups of userswith particular strong requirements for e-mail. Beforethere are a substantial number of users, the prob-ability that the particular individual you wish toreach is on e-mail is quite low. The utility of e-mailfor the first users is usually high, so whether othermembers of their organization have e-mail is lessimportant.

At some point, however, the dynamic changes in thevalue of e-mail is driven by whether it achieves acritical mass of users. Even before a critical massexists, once there is a perception that a communi-cations utility will be broadly used, that perceptionitself becomes an important force pushing others toadopt it. First there is the reality that by investingheavily in messaging systems, an organization’smanagement is sending a rather clear and powerfulsignal that it is a valued medium. Second, the grow-ing number of users adds to the social pressure touse messaging more (Markus, 1987). Rice et al. (1990)conducted a study that was unusual in that they col-lected data before and nine months after e-mail was


Table 5 Manager Views of the Effects of E-Mail Usage in their Organizations (1995 Louis Harris Surveyand Lotus Gold Program Respondents)

Managers choosing response that e-mail had "Increased to a great Europe USextent" each of the following

Ease of communications with employees 58.7% 46.3%

Speed of communications with employees 63.5% 46.1%

Ability to share internal information 54.8% 55.6%

Ability to get input from more people in decision-making 46.8% 34.1%

Ease of communications with customers/clients 21.0% 16.0%

Speed of communications with customers/clients 27.4% 18.2%

installed in an organization. They found that as thenumber of users increases, it generates social press-ures that lead individuals to place a higher value onmessaging, stimulating use and broadened accept-ance.

Whatever starts an initial investment in messaging,its power grows with numbers. As the number of e-mail users grows, there are more potential recipients,the efficiency of using e-mail for sending out infor-mal notes and for document transfer increases,Return, Forward and ‘cc:’ copy functions are moreuseful and mailing list tools increase in power. Atsome point it becomes a universal communicationstool, and all members will want access to the system.

From the perspective of the financial officer, how-ever, is e-mail like the telephone, where almosteveryone must have one, or are the major benefitsfound at a lower level of deployment? The Harris andLotus surveys reported on above also asked whatpercent of an organization’s users were on e-mail,enabling one to ask if having the extent of e-maildeployment has an effect on responding managerviews of e-mail benefits. The responses are separatedinto three groups based on whether they are aboveor below familiar 80/20 thresholds. When the groupsare compared whether it has made communications

Table 6 Critical Mass and Manager Views of Organizational Benefits of E-Mail (1995 Louis Harris Surveyand Lotus Gold Program Respondents)

Percent of Firm’s Employees Using E-mail1–20% 21–79% 80% +

Ease of communications increased "a great deal": Europe** 33.3% 30.8% 77.8%US*** 24.7% 45.6% 55.5%

Sharing of information increased "a great deal": Europe* 18.2% 46.2% 69.4%US*** 31.2% 51.5% 68.6%

Ability to get input from more people increased "a great deal": EuropeNS 36.4% 46.2% 50.0%US*** 23.7% 32.2% 39.8%

With 60 respondents, European differences are NSNot Significant, or statistically significant at the .05* or .01** levels. ***Relation-ships for US data with its larger sample size of 500 are all significant at .001 level or beyond.


easier, increased the sharing of information, andwhether it has allowed more input from a wider var-iety of individuals. The results support a view thatcritical mass is very strongly related to messaginghaving positive benefits for the organization, and thatbenefits are still perceived as growing at high levelsof deployment.

E-Mail Deployment and NewManagement Challenges

What strength there is to be found in this review isbased on the strong convergence between manage-ment experience with messaging and the researchliterature. Surveys of the views of managers are sus-pect because they may be measuring the popularityof management fads, enthusiasm for a technology, orsimply show that individuals must believe in thetechnologies that they request and manage budgetsfor. Here we find that the views of the managersreported on are consistent with the findings of theavailable research in depth, and fall into patterns thatare consistent with what is known about the role ofcritical mass in communications systems. Research indepth gives us confidence that the findings apply to


particular organizations, but raises questions aboutwhether the particular companies being studied areso different that they cannot be considered typicalof organizations in general. When both types of dataagree, they support one another, suggesting one canhave more confidence in the convergent conclusions.

There are two types of conclusions that can bereached. First, there appears to be strong concurrencein management views based on actual practice, andthe academic literature: E-mail makes organizationalcommunications easier, faster, and more efficient. Ithelps reach more employees with information, andhas characteristics that make it a medium of choicefor getting more complete information on a subject.There is a price to be paid in unwanted mail, a prob-lem that can grow into a highly disruptive problemif not managed by organizational policy and socialpractice. When unwanted e-mail is held to manage-able levels, the extra effort involved in receivingmore messages is mitigated by the less intrusivenature of e-mail. In sum, e-mail has important bene-fits that far out-weigh the costs and disadvantages.In an era of down-sizing, out-sourcing and decentral-ization, particular attention should be paid to thevalue of e-mail for increasing the commitment ofemployees on the social and geographic peripheriesof the organization in the organization’s goals. Itseems clear that the more completely e-mail isdeployed, the more these effects will be achieved.

Low Level, Intermittent Relationships and E-Mail.A second conclusion is that, by supporting thegrowth of a wide variety and growing number of lowintensity and informal relationships between anorganization’s employees and others both inside andexternal to the organization, e-mail is posing a newand paradoxical management challenge. Manage-ment studies argue that informal organizationalflows are essential, and they are becoming more andmore critical in a complex world of global decentral-ization (Casson and Singh, 1993) collaboration amongcompanies (Schrader, 1991) product developmentteams (Allen, 1977) and technology innovation(Rogers, 1982.) Yet the character of these informationflows is that, while they may in fact be more efficientthan formal mechanisms (Macdonald, 1996) they areoutside the organizational lines of authority and toonumerous and varied to monitor. As more and moreinformation flows inside and across organizationalboundaries without formal sanction, ultimateresponsibility for the valuing of information must ofnecessity be placed on the individual.

Some senior managers who resist the widespreadintroduction of e-mail understand quite well thatdeploying e-mail has the consequence of at leastsome shift to a less supervised form of informationexchange. They realize they are being asked to con-tribute to some erosion of formal authority, openingthe door wider to exchanges of information acrossorganizational boundaries they do not have an


opportunity to approve or disapprove. For them thequestion is whether the demands for rapid interper-sonal communications in modern enterprises can bemet without broad use of e-mail.

For those who choose to continue the widespreadimplementation of e-mail, an abiding question is howto motivate, direct, sanction, and reward individualswhen processes are more informal, and often operatewithout the involvement or knowledge of formalmanagement. The growing management challenge ofmessaging is not technical or financial. The key ispreparing and motivating individual employees onan unprecedented scale to understand and be com-mitted to the organization’s goals, and in turn makeintelligent decisions about the collection, evaluationand informal transfer of information to advance theorganization’s best interests.

Acknowledgement

This paper is an extension of remarks given to the annualmeeting of the European Electronic Messaging Association,Maastricht, June 1997. Web: http://www.eema.org. The workhas been substantially assisted by the useful comments anddata provided by EEMA members. The telephone survey datacollected by the Louis Harris survey organization in the U.S.reported on here was supported by Control Data Systems.The Lotus Gold program of the Lotus European DevelopmentCorporation supported the collection of comparable data fromEuropean companies. British Telecom’s National BusinessCommunications Corporate Clients Internet TechnologySpecialists and sigma generously allowed the author to useresults and analyze data they had collected on e-mail benefitsat BT.

Notes

1. The Harris telephone survey was conducted in Februaryand March, 1995. Respondents included 404 senior man-agers in Fortune 2000 firms with responsibilities for cor-porate communications responsibilities, and 101 compara-ble managers in U.S. Federal and state agencies. Virtuallyall of these organizations have well over 10000 employees,and they report having mature mail systems with an aver-age of 62.5% of their employees using e-mail.

2. The European companies were located in Britain (23),Belgium (8), Sweden (6), Finland (6), Ireland (6), Nether-lands (5), Austria (4), Norway (2), and one each fromFrance, Switzerland, Denmark and Germany. The mostcommon industries represented were banking and finance(17) and information systems, computers and telecom-munications (13). Another 7 represented governmentagencies. They had a median of 2250 employees. While 8of these organizations had had e-mail for two years orless, the average was 6 years, and 15 had ten years ormore experience with e-mail systems. That, their partici-pation in the Lotus Gold program and the fact that onaverage 69 percent of their employees were e-mail userssuggest that on balance the group should be seen as lead-ing users of messaging and not as typical Europeanorganizations.

3. BT’s National Business Communications Corporate Cli-ents Internet Technology Specialists commissioned sigmato conduct the study. They generously shared their analy-sis as well as raw data supporting the interview findings


presented here, and the results shown in Table 4 wereproduced by the author.

4. Personal communications, 12 and 15 August 1997 withattending participants.

5. Personal communication, 22 August 1997 with the man-ager of e-mail systems for a large U.S. petroleum com-pany.

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WILLIAM LUCASInternational Center forResearch on the Manage-ment of Technology,Sloan School of Manage-ment, MassachusettsInstitute of Technology,38 Memorial Drive E56-390E, Cambridge, Mas-sachusetts 02193-4307,USA.

William Lucas is Execu-tive Director of the International Center forResearch on the Management of Technology at MIT.His career includes the State University of NewYork at Buffalo, the US National Science Foun-dation, the Rand Corporation and the US NationalTelecommunications and Information Adminis-tration. He also spent some years as a senior man-ager and management consultant in private indus-try. Prior to joining MIT he was Visiting Professorat the George Washington University.


Effects of E-Mail on the Organization

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