Gender Differences in the Effects of Media Richness

Abstract

Media richness theory argues that performance improves when team members use “richer” media for equivocal tasks. Virtually all research on media richness theory has focused on perceptions: surveys of individuals’beliefs about media rather than investigating actual performance with richer versus leaner media. This experiment studied the effects of media richness on decision making in two-person teams (all male, all female, and mixed gender) using one form of “new media” (computer-mediated communication). Participants took longer to make decisions with computer-mediated communication. Matching richness to task equivocality only resulted in better performance for the all-female teams, likely because females are more sensitive to nonverbal communication and more affected by its absence in computer-mediated communication. For remaining teams, using richer face-to-face communication did not improve performance to a greater extent for more equivocal than less equivocal tasks. Results support media richness theory only for all-female teams.

Sex differences in the effects of visual contact and eye contact in negotiations

“…Because the presence of eye contact increases a shared understanding for females (Dennis et al, 1999;Troemel-Ploetz, 1991), it was easier for them to obtain higher quality agreements when eye contact was available than when it was not. However, because it is easier for two males to develop a shared understanding without eye contact (Dalton et al, 2005;Tannen, 1990), the absence of eye contact facilitated higher agreements for them.…”

“…Instead, we based our predictions on previous findings outside the negotiation literature showing that visual contact can increase comfort among females because it helps them to understand others (Dennis et al, 1999;Troemel-Ploetz, 1991) and decrease comfort among males because it highlights competition (Dalton et al, 2005;Tannen, 1990). Although we did not measure competitive emotions, it is likely that these are responsible for the shifts in agreement quality because people in Western societies are more likely to define negotiations as an opportunity to compete with others (Brett, 2007).…”

“…For example, females tend to communicate in a style in which the primary purpose is to discuss and understand others' perspectives (Troemel-Ploetz, 1991) and the presence of visual contact can help them to do so more effectively (Dennis, Kinney, & Caisey Hung, 1999). As a result, it will be easier for females to understand others when they can see others compared to when they cannot.…”

“…For example, it is common for two unacquainted males to adopt a communication style in which the goal is to win the discussion (Tannen, 1990). Because visual contact can highlight these competitive intentions (Dennis et al, 1999), males may be less distracted when visual contact is absent. So, because males are less comfortable with visual contact, its absence should help them to achieve a better understanding of the counterpart, and higher quality agreements as a result.…”

Herding cats in a FOSS ecosystem: a tale of communication and coordination for release management

“…The "bandwidth" in a communication channel corresponds to the number of cues in which an information can be transferred [14]. The cues can be verbal (speech, writing) or non-verbal (seeing, touching, tone of voice, vocal inflection, physical gesture, smelling, touching) [14,16,17,62].…”