You’ve Got Mail!

by Karen English

But don’t reply until you’ve heard the latest from Steven Currall

It’s hard to imagine navigating a business day without e-mail. It has become the tool of choice for arranging meetings, making announcements, and keeping colleagues in the ever-widening loop of communications. But before you hit send, consider the ramifications of e-mail itself. Could there be discussions that become less—not more—productive when they are held through a medium that delivers written messages and responses at Web speed?

Anytime, Anywhere

Steven C. Currall has researched the notion that disputes, for one, are less likely to be resolved if they are waged through e-mail. Currall, the William and Stephanie Sick Professor of Entrepreneurship and an associate professor of management, psychology, and statistics, teamed up with Raymond A. Friedman, associate professor of management at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, to study how the nature of e-mail affects conflict. “The convenience of e-mail is terrific,” says Currall, “but most of us are not as sensitive as we should be to this conflict dynamic.”

The results of Currall and Friedman’s research on that dynamic are reported in “E-Mail Escalation: Dispute Exacerbating Elements of Electronic Communication,” a paper that is so fresh it hasn’t been published yet, but you can download it at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=304966. What they learned holds some practical caveats for anyone who can’t get through the day without checking e-mail, but especially for managers.
“We think the use of e-mail as a communication medium increases the likelihood that conflict will escalate,” Currall says. “It’s not so much that e-mail causes conflict, but when people try to resolve a conflict or negotiate using e-mail, its properties predispose the conflict toward escalation.”

Conflict and related issues of resolution and trust have interested Currall throughout his career. So when he and Friedman looked at conflict in the context of e-mail communications, they first considered how the nature of the medium might affect the way a dispute unfolds.

Smile When You Say That

The researchers looked at several properties of electronic communications that are absent when disputes are waged in person or by phone. “There are things about e-mail that make it easy to misunderstand or misinterpret the language and therefore the intent or motive behind why people are writing,” points out Currall.

Most obviously, people using e-mail to communicate are not in the same surroundings. Because they can’t see or hear each other, people engaged in an e-mail discussion are unable to respond to nuances in intonation or to the timing and pacing of spoken responses.

Removing factors like body language and tone of voice from a conflict deprives the parties of many clues about what the other person is really thinking and how the discussion is going. E-mail can’t give you an opportunity to see how the person on the other end is reacting to your message. In fact, e-mail comes with very little social feedback that could help you adjust your response to what the other party is feeling.

The recipient of your message, in turn, is not able to observe your facial expression as you make your argument. In drafting a response, he will be unable to adjust his comments to what he thinks you are feeling—a move that might ease the way to a resolution. Pursuing a dispute in isolation, then, not only significantly decreases the chance of developing a sense of shared understanding, it also decreases opportunities to smooth things over.

“I have personally had some of my e-mails read wrong,” reports Eric Elfman MBA ’95, CEO of Houston-based DataCert Inc. “E-mails necessarily lack the ‘flavor’ of a real conversation. And that flavor is the difference between a joke and an insult and between an innocent comment and a rude one.”

Turnabout Is Fair Play

E-mail lets us deliver messages almost as soon as they are produced. This can be a great advantage—unless the discussion involves a conflict. In a face-to-face discussion, parties take turns and, ideally, have a sense that they are participating equally. E-mail messages, on the other hand, can and do cross.

Instead of the parties to an argument sequencing their responses to each other, via e-mail they can send and receive messages at once. Because the rapid-fire nature of e-mail deprives both parties of time to adjust to changing arguments, it creates another obstacle to resolution.

And Another Thing...

E-mail affects more than how we communicate—it changes what is communicated. Participants in an e-mail conflict often take advantage of what Currall calls e-mail’s “reviewability” and “revisability” to shape and reshape a response.

Face-to-face discussions lack opportunities to rework arguments, but if you find yourself engaged in an e-mail conflict, you can pause to mull over your word choice as you craft a compelling case. You might even crank out a lengthy argument that bundles several points in one message.

Currall points out that the ability to revise e-mail—a real plus in everyday communications—can be a distinct liability in a conflict. When both senders and receivers of lengthy e-mail have an opportunity to turn the content over and over in their minds, anger tends to increase.
“We are so dependent on e-mail that we resort to it when we should not,” cautions Currall. Even the best writers can be foiled by e-mail disputes. “You have to be extraordinarily careful, even if you are a skilled communicator and think about your wording carefully,” he warns.

The very act of focusing attention on creating a lengthy reply can make the conflict seem more important than it is. As the magnitude of the dispute grows in the minds of the parties, the intensity of their focus on the e-mail increases. More and more editing of messages means the writer is more and more involved in the communication and the dispute, making a face-saving conclusion less likely.

Fighting Words

Deprived of a rich social context, e-mailers are left with only the cognitive content of their messages. “You cannot vary tone,” says Currall. “You cannot show nonverbal signals that indicate benevolent intent.”

The result is often aggressive tactics and messages that are “heavier” than they would otherwise be. And it doesn’t get better. “If we continue pursuing a dispute via e-mail, there will be meaning and tone innuendo and all these unintended things that will ooze out,” explains Currall. “It’s an issue of probability.”

Operating without clues about the other person’s state of mind also weakens the social bond between the e-mailers. As the other person is increasingly depersonalized in the mind of an e-mail disputant, the conflict is seen as less and less resolvable. Replies become angrier and more aggressive, and the parties stop “listening” and lose faith that the other person wants to settle things. Any possible resolution becomes a casualty of the nature of e-mail. “Attempts to resolve conflicts via e-mail often spin out of control,” says Currall.

Better Switch than Fight

Currall’s research offers straightforward guidance for e-mail users: Instead of continuing a dispute electronically, Currall recommends switching to a face-to-face or phone discussion. “As soon as your blood pressure starts going up or you start feeling cranky,” he advises, “take your fingers off the keyboard and put them on the telephone. As soon as the potential for conflict comes up, stop using e-mail.”

Elfman agrees. “I have learned where e-mail is never effective,” he says. “If you are relating a tough message or trying to resolve a dispute, it is rare that e-mail will suffice. It is not a one-for-one replacement for the telephone.”

But the downside of e-mail communication does not have to be the dark side. Understanding e-mail’s drawbacks can mean that all electronic communication becomes more productive. It all comes down to awareness. “What we are trying to do,” says Currall, “is heighten the sensitivity of people to the characteristics of e-mail because most people don’t even think about it.”