Gender Effects on Managerial Communication and Work Performance

Email has been a vital communication medium for many years now. It provides speedy and efficient communication of information that can be easily and quickly created, edited, stored, discarded, organized, appended, and forwarded. Its “technical neutrality” has minimized possible communication distortions caused by differences in occupational, ethnic or gender features and expanded connections between individuals in different parts of the organization and/or different organizations (Ducheneaut & Watts, 2005). Thus transmission of information via email is also linked to work performance. Recent studies suggest that email has poorer communication cues which often generate lower, rather than higher, productivity (Moore et al., 2008). Nonetheless, use of information and communications technologies, work intensity and work performance are essentially related to individual characteristics. The present study examines how email flow influences work performance and stress among men and women managers (Wasserman & Richmond-Abbott, 2005; Bury, 2010), drawing on “gender-divide” assumptions. The results imply that preferences regarding technology-based communication may increase work performance but can also increase stress among women managers (Karr-Wisniewski & Ying, 2010). Management necessitates increased technology-based communication, in which email plays a significant role, possibly at ABSTRACT