Search results

Emailing does not preclude emotional exchange and many times it causes us to engage in spiralling exchanges of increasingly angry emailing. The purpose of this chapter is threefold: to explore how factors of temporality are related to anger when emailing, to model circumstances that protect against, but also ignite, anger escalation, and to raise a discussion for practitioners of how to avoid damaging email communication. By intersecting literature on communication, information systems, psychology and organisational studies, factors leading to an ‘emotional verge’ are identified and summarised in a model showing factors likely to prime, but also protect against, anger escalation.

The study aims to investigate how modern methods of communication within the construction industry have brought forth a new cognitive process that participants in this industry should undertake when communicating.

To achieve the objectives of the study, a literature review was compiled on the legal status of electronic communication and what the impact of the Electronic Communications and Transactions (ECT) Act, Act 25 of 2002, has had on electronic communication. A questionnaire was also distributed to quantity surveyors to ascertain the level of knowledge with regard to the application of the ECT Act.

The study found that participants are not familiar with the ECT Act and that it is highly advisable that parties to the agreement be made fully aware of how communications should be dealt with during the duration of the contract.

The study is restricted to the South African construction industry and construction contracts and a small target population of professional quantity surveyors practicing in the Gauteng Province. The results of the research will be taken as representative of the entire country.

In the modern era, notifications are increasingly being communicated electronically, e.g. by electronic mail, linked computer networks, the Internet and cellular phones with appropriate media capabilities. Participants in the built environment must know how to correctly, effectively and legally, deal with this information revolution.

Modern means of communication, including in particular electronic emailing, demand that users properly appreciate whether the chosen method of communication has a contractually binding and legally enforceable effect. Thus, in an ever-changing built environment, participants should not only dedicate more time to ensure that information conveyed does not have legal implications, except if so intended, but that the information conveyed is unambiguous, grammatically correct and formulated professionally. This article has value as it investigates how industry stakeholders perceive the legal status of electronic communication and recommends how it should be dealt with during the execution of the contract.

While academic research has been conducted on auditors’ ability to exercise professional skepticism in face-to-face client interviews, little is known about auditors’ application of professional skepticism in email communication with the client. The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that impact auditor professional skepticism during client inquiries conducted through email.

A 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment was conducted with 69 undergraduate and graduate auditing students as surrogates for auditors. The experimental design crossed two levels of client expressed confidence (high and low) and two levels of client response timing to the auditor’s email inquiry (earlier than expected and later than expected).

Results indicate that management expressed confidence moderates the influence of management response timing on auditor professional skepticism and that auditor perceptions of client credibility mediate this interactive effect. When the client’s response is low in confidence, auditors perceive a later-than-expected response from the manager as less credible than an earlier-than-expected response, which leads to less reliance on management explanations, which signifies more skepticism. However, when confidence is high, response timing does not impact perceptions of the client’s credibility.

The results imply that junior auditors should be vigilant of how communication cues in client emails may impact their judgments. Even though management response timing and expressed confidence should not influence auditor skepticism per se, auditors seem to vary their level of skepticism with the timing of the client’s response when client confidence is low but not when client confidence is high, despite the information content of the client’s response being held constant.

This study contributes to the literature on professional skepticism by addressing the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s concerns about the need for auditors to exercise more professional skepticism in practice, particularly in an environment in which computer-mediated communication is increasing at a fast pace; and assists practitioners in better understanding the factors that influence the degree of skepticism auditors exercise when collecting audit evidence through email. The study should be of interest to audit firms, as it provides evidence on whether auditors use nonverbal cues such as chronemics, or time-related messages, in email communication to judge management and evidence reliability and credibility.

Research questions that this paper attempts to answer are – do the features in general email communication have any significance to a teaching faculty member leaving the business school? Do the sentiments expressed in email communication have any significance to a teaching faculty member leaving the business school? Do the stages mentioned in the transtheoretical model have any relevance to the email behaviour of an individual when he or she goes through the decision process leading to the decision to quit? The purpose of this paper is to study email patterns and use predictive analytics to correlate with the real-world situation of leaving the business school.

The email repository (2010–2017) of 126 teaching faculty members who were associated with a business school as full-time faculty members is the data set that was used for the research. Of the 126 teaching faculty members, 42 had left the business school during this time frame. Correlation analysis, word count analysis and sentiment analysis were executed using “R” programming, and sentiment “R” package was used to understand the sentiment and its association in leaving the business school. From the email repository, a rich feature set of data was extracted for correlation analysis to discover the features which had strong correlation with the faculty member leaving the business school. The research also used data-logging tools to extract aggregated statistics for word frequency counts and sentiment features.

Those faculty members who decide to leave are involved more in external communication and less in internal communications. Also, those who decide to leave initiate fewer email conversations and opt to forward emails to colleagues. Correlation analysis shows that negative sentiment goes down, as faculty members leave the organisation and this is in contrary to the existing review of literature. The research also shows that the triggering point or the intention to leave is positively correlated to the downward swing of the emotional valence (positive sentiment). A number of email features have shown change in patterns which are correlated to a faculty member quitting the business school.

Faculty members of only one business school have been considered and this is primary due to cost, privacy and complexities involved in procuring and handling the data. Also, the reasons for exhibiting the sentiments and their root cause have not been studied. Also the designation, roles and responsibilities of faculty members have not been taken into consideration.

Business schools all over India always have a challenge to recruit good faculty members who can take up research activities, teach and also shoulder administrative responsibilities. Retaining faculty members and keeping attrition levels low will help business schools to maintain the standards of excellence that they aspire. This research is immensely useful for business school, which can use email analytics in predicting the intention of the faculty members leaving their business school.

Although past studies have studied attrition, this study uses predictive analytics and maps it to the intention to quit. This study helps business schools to predict the chance of faculty members leaving the business school which is of immense value, as appropriate measures can be taken to retain and restrict attrition.

This paper explores how and to what extent the appearance and wide use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) may enhance scientific communication and knowledge. The first part analyses the general boundaries of scientific communication, focusing on the use of email. It summarises and develops the results of relevant international studies and surveys on computer‐mediated communication; it identifies, on the one hand, the principal social settings and contexts in which email is used and, on the other, the characteristic features which determine specific communication models. The analysis provides evidence of the various factors which determine the dynamics of electronic communication and which, more specifically, define the difference between business and scientific communication. The second part of the paper explores the close relationship between communication and knowledge in the scientific sector and the role played by ICTs. The assumption that ICTs ought to enhance the acquisition, sharing and transmission of scientific knowledge is questioned by the distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge: ICTs ultimately appear to provide a strong drive only to processes of explicit/coded knowledge handling. Nevertheless, exploring the main components of tacit knowledge in depth, and considering recent ICT‐based applications, it is possible to foresee new opportunities for the creation and dissemination of knowledge through networks.

Status is a central aspect of teamwork relationships and successful collaboration in teams, both online and offline. Status group membership and status perception shape behavioural expectations and norm perceptions of what is appropriate, but despite their importance have been neglected in previous research. Status effects are of special interest in online collaboration, e.g. via email, where no immediate feedback or non-verbal/paraverbal communication and direct observation is possible. The purpose of this study is to address this gap in research.

An experimental scenario study with two different professional status groups (lecturers and students) tested status effects on causal attributions, intergroup bias and emotional and collaborative responses to perceived norm violations in emails.

Results overall showed three key findings: a “black-sheep-effect” with harsher negative attributions for same status members, more aggression and less cooperation towards lower status senders and stronger (negative) emotional reactions towards high status senders.

The findings are important for managing professional online communication because negative personal attributions, strong emotions and aggressive behaviours can increase team conflict, lead to mistakes and generally undermine performance.

In an effort to evaluate if and how emojis might boost customer engagement in email marketing, the current research aims to analyzes emojis' effects and investigates how certain features, such as the type of emoji or the way of emojis' presentation (repetition and position), moderate their effectiveness.

This research comprises four experimental studies. The first two analyze whether the presence and the type of emoji (facial vs non-facial) influence customer engagement. Then, two more studies analyze the influence of the presence and type of emoji, as well as repetitions (repetition vs no repetitions) and positions (left vs right). The data collection is through email marketing campaigns, with two types of brands. The analysis is a fractional factorial design in one- and two-way interactions to identify the influence of presentation features.

Emojis influence customer engagement and can trigger interactive behaviors and increase customer engagement, even in a channel that generally is less prone to interaction. The emojis increase the probability of opening the email, the number of times email gets opened and clicks to access additional content.

The varied results suggest the need for more research to confirm the findings regarding presentation features. This research offers novel implications for interactive marketing and the theory of visual rhetoric because the research establishes how visual stimuli such as emojis can persuade and capture customer attention and increase customer engagement.

Practitioners can optimize email marketing by using emojis strategically to attract audience interest, provoke interactions, build relationships and generate word of mouth, leading to better consumer experiences, loyalty and brand profitability.

Most studies use semantic analysis to analyze emojis; the current study instead tests whether emojis can increase customer engagement in a less-interactive channel and then also considers the moderating role of several emoji-relevant variables. In addition, the authors apply the theory of visual rhetoric to explicate the original findings, which are gathered from a unique data set involving real marketing campaigns.

In this chapter, we focus on virtual teams and emotions during postmerger and acquisition (M&A) integration. Our main research question is “How to manage emotions and virtual teams following cross-border M&A?”. We answer this question through the following research subquestions: (1) What virtual interaction can be identified post-M&A?; (2) What emotions arises from virtual communication; and (3) What emotions and challenges do virtual teams encounter following cross-border M&As? This research is based on a single case study. The main findings imply that emotions, trust, and cultural differences play an important role in virtual interaction following a cross-border M&A.

This study aims to understand the role of technology in relationship maintenance among romantic partners.

It takes a qualitative, inductive approach and collected data from in-depth interviews with 20 individuals who are married or in cohabiting relationships.

This study supports the extension of relationship maintenance typology derived from face-to-face relationship studies to technology-mediated communication, but highlights how technology use transforms the implementation of maintenance behaviors. Technology helps couples coordinate tasks and keep in touch with friends and families. Although technology-mediated communication cannot replace face-to-face interactions in relationship talk and sharing in-depth feelings, it plays an important role in redefining the ways in which couples interact positively, maintain mutual understanding, and secure the future of the relationship. Moreover, this study identifies a new maintenance behavior, communication coordination. These maintenance behaviors reflect a tension between maintaining connectivity and managing the boundary between work and home and between the public and private spheres.

This study builds on previous work on technology use and relationship maintenance, but takes a different qualitative, inductive approach to address the limitations in the survey research dominant in the literature. It helps us understand the advantages and challenges in maintaining relationships in the digital age and also explores the factors that influence the patterns of technology use in relationship maintenance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the way one farmers’ market organization used an e-newsletter to establish and maintain their brand image as a socially responsible local food outlet. This research analyzed managerial communication efforts to promote farmers’ market products through email marketing. This analysis also revealed the positive and negative brand images that the e-newsletter communicates and how those align or fail to align with public opinion about of farmers’ markets.

The author spent 2.5 years participating in the farmers’ market organization that comprises the focus of this study, and this included conducting multiple studies using interview, survey and ethnographic methods. The data set for the present study includes two years’ worth of marketing messages from the e-newsletter campaign, which included 31 e-newsletters. Thematic analysis (Terry et al., 2017) was used to discover the dominant messages and values present. Analysis extended to textual messages, images, timing, design and overall newsletter content.

The results show that the digital communications at the Lawrence Farmers’ Market (LFM) promoted messages of getting to know your local farmer, eating fresh and healthy food and supporting local products. Additionally, the market frequently attempted to make the market accessible by communicating operating days and times. Finally, the newsletter message analysis also revealed that the LFM brand could be characterized as lacking consistency, having poor organization, and using poor design principles.

This research extends the knowledge of how farmers’ market organizations engage in brand image management. While there are scores of studies on consumer preferences, we have very few that analyze the ways farmers' market organizations spread key brand ideas to consumers. Additionally, this research offers other implications for nonprofits, looking to improve their brand image with limited resources.