Abstract
This work investigates in-depth the communication practices within a workplace to understand whether workers interact face to face or more indirectly with email. We analysed the interactions to understand how these changes affect our work (productivity, deadlines, interesting task) and our wellbeing (positive and negative affective states),by using a variety of data collection methods (sensors and surveys). Our analysis revealed that overall email was the most frequent medium of communication, but when taking into account just the communication within working hours (8am to 7pm), that face to face interactions were preffered. Correlation analysis revealed significant relationships between Affective States and Situational Factors while Longitudinal Analysis revealed an impact of communication features and measures of self reported Productivity and Creativity. These findings lead us to believe that different communication processes (synchronous and asynchronous) can impact Positive and Negative Affective States as well as how productive and creative you feel at work.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bliese, P.: Multilevel Modeling in R (2.2)–A Brief Introduction to R, the multilevel package and the nlme package (2006)
Brown, M.G., Svenson, R.A.: Measuring R&D Productivity. Res. Manag. 41, 30–35 (1998)
Cameron, A.F., Webster, J.: Unintended consequences of emerging communication technologies: Instant messaging in the workplace. Comput. Human Behav. 21, 85–103 (2005)
Cascio, W.F.: Managing a virtual workplace. Acad. Manag. Exec. 14, 81–90 (2000)
Csikszentmihalyi, M., Larson, R.: Validity and reliability of the experience-sampling method. J. Nerv. Ment. Dis. 175, 526–536 (1987)
Daft, R.L., Lengel, R.H., Trevino, L.K.: Message equivocality, media selection, and manager performance: Implications for information systems. MIS Q., 355–366 (1987)
Dennis, A.R., Fuller, R.M., Valacich, J.S.: Media, tasks, and communication processes: A theory of media synchronicity. MIS Q. 32, 575–600 (2008)
Dennis, A.R., Kinney, S.T.: Testing media richness theory in the new media: The effects of cues, feedback, and task equivocality. Inf. Syst. Res. 9, 256–274 (1998)
Dennis, A.R., Valacich, J.S.: Rethinking media richness: Towards a theory of media synchronicity. In: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, HICSS-32, p. 10 (1999)
Dirks, K.T., Ferrin, D.L.: The Role of Trust in Organizational Settings. Organ. Sci. 12, 450–467 (2001)
Ekman, P.: Are there basic emotions (1992)
Ean, L.C.: Face-to-face versus computer-mediated communication: Exploring employees preference of effective employee communication channel (2010)
Field, A.: Discovering statistics using SPSS. Sage Publications (2009)
Fleeson, W.: Situation-based contingencies underlying trait-content manifestation in behavior (2007)
Fleeson, W.: Toward a Structure- and Process-Integrated View of Personality: Traits as Density Distributions of States. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 80, 1011–1027 (2001)
Jarvenpaa, S.L., Knoll, K., Leidner, D.E.: Is anybody out there? Antecedents of trust in global virtual teams. J. Manag. Inf. Syst., 29–64 (1998)
Johri, A.: Look ma, no email!: blogs and IRC as primary and preferred communication tools in a distributed firm. In: Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 305–308 (2011)
Kim, T., Bian, L., Hinds, P., Pentland, A.: Encouraging cooperation using sociometric feedback. In: Proc. of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2010)
Kim, T., McFee, E., Olguin, D.O., Waber, B., Pentland, A.: others: Sociometric badges: Using sensor technology to capture new forms of collaboration. J. Organ. Behav. 33, 412–427 (2012)
Kalimeri, K.: Traits, States and Situations: Automatic Prediction of Personality and Situations from Actual Behavior (2013)
Lepri, B., Staiano, J., Rigato, G., Kalimeri, K., Finnerty, A., Pianesi, F., Sebe, N., Pentland, A.: The SocioMetric Badges Corpus: A Multilevel Behavioral Dataset for Social Behavior in Complex Organizations. In: SOCIALCOM-PASSAT 2012: Proceedings of the 2012 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing and 2012 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust, pp. 623–628. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2012)
Moustafa, K.S.: Differences in the Use of Media Across Cultures. Encycl. Virtual Communities Technol. 131 (2006)
Olguin Olguin, D., Waber, B.N., Kim, T., Mohan, A., Ara, K., Pentland, A.: Sensible organizations: technology and methodology for automatically measuring organizational behavior. IEEE Trans. Syst. man Cybern. Part B Cybern. a Publ. IEEE Syst. Man Cybern. Soc. 39, 43–55 (2009)
Olgun, D.O., Gloor, P.A., Pentland, A.: (Sandy): Wearable Sensors for Pervasive Healthcare Management (2009)
Pentland, A.: How social networks network best. Harv. Bus. Rev. 87, 37 (2009)
Soto, F.: Virtual Organizations BET on People to Succeed! Human Factors in Virtual Organizations: Boundary-less Communication, Environment, and Trust. J. Strateg. Leadersh. 3, 24–35 (2011)
Terraciano, A., McCrae, R.R., Costa Jr, P.T.: Factorial and construct validity of the Italian Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). Eur. J. Psychol. Assess. 19, 131 (2003)
Vest, D., Long, M., Thomas, L., Palmquist, M.E.: Relating communication training to workplace requirements: The perspective of new engineers. Prof. Commun. IEEE Trans. 38, 11–17 (1995)
Watson, D., Clark, L.A., Tellegen, A.: Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 54, 1063–1070 (1988)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Finnerty, A.N., Kalimeri, K., Pianesi, F. (2014). Towards Happier Organisations: Understanding the Relationship between Communication and Productivity. In: Aiello, L.M., McFarland, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8851. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_33
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_33
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13733-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13734-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)