Emotions Increase Potential for Miscommunication in Emails
Kristin Byron
Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, February 2007
Available
online (forthcoming in January 2008 journal article)
By some estimates, more than 100 billion emails are sent daily by approximately 1.1 billion users. New research from Kristin Byron, assistant professor of management in the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, suggests that those 1.1 billion email users may be expressing and interpreting emotions in email more often than we think. Evidence suggests that employees often unintentionally and intentionally express and – often inaccurately perceive – emotions in emails at work.
Byron's paper, forthcoming in the Academy of Management Review, finds that the lack of nonverbal cues such as facial expressions and body language combined with delayed feedback compounds this misinterpretation. The paper further indicates that while employees are able to identify when a coworker or client has inaccurately conveyed emotion, they are unable to identify the same problem in themselves.
Byron argues that a first step toward improving accuracy in emails is to recognize the possibility that we are fallible as both email senders and receivers. "Miscommunication in emails can be caused by senders' inability to accurately convey their intended meaning and by receivers' inability to accurately perceive the sender's intended meaning," she says.
The good news is there are solutions to potential miscommunications as a result of email. The author advises that email users who use established, shared cues to communicate emotion or who seek clarity by repeating important information may end up more accurately expressing their emotions by email.
Those same techniques can be used in reading emails as well. For instance, recipients who ask clarifying questions or restate the intention of an email are more likely to perceive emotions more accurately.
