ă"ñá

E-mail as a Management Tool

Abstract

With the increasing use of new electronic communication media like electronic mail (e-mail) many organizations ask themselves what will we earn from buying these media. Even organizations that already bought these media ask themselves do we use it enough and do we use it usefully.

In this work we examined how managers and workers in My Organization, select their communication media? What make them choose one media over the other?

One of the more important theories about media selection is Information Richness Theory (IRT). This theory emphasis the connection between the content of the message and the ability of the medium to transfer the message clearly. Our research hypotheses in this work are that (a) managers and workers will choose face-to-face meetings and telephone to deliver equivocal and not obvious messages and (b) managers and workers will choose e-mail and letters to transfer plain and regular messages. These research hypotheses are according to IRT.

When we'll compare the theory's prediction of media selection against the actual behavior of the managers and workers in My Organization as it seems from the questionnaire, we can tell if the use of communication media is useful. Gaps between the theory's prediction and the real life are telling us that the use is inefficient in media selection.

In this work we found that managers and workers in My Organization use communication media the same the theory predicts. Those findings are actually telling us that the use of media is efficient according to IRT. This led us to accept the research hypotheses.

However we found that the use of e-mail is somewhat smaller than what is efficient to the organization. We offered some proposals to increase the use of e-mail.