U Unexpected Outcomes of Lean E-collaboration

Over the years, many theories have been used to understand e-communication and e-collaboration behavior (Kock, 2004; Markus, 2005). Arguably, the most widely used among those theories has been media richness theory (Daft & Lengel, 1986) even though there has been mounting evidence that its predictions do not hold in a number of situations (Markus, 1994). One key prediction of media richness theory is that communication media of low richness (e.g., e-mail as opposed to face-to-face) consistently leads to a decrease in the quality of the outcomes of group tasks. One of the complicating issues associated with media richness theory is that there is abundant evidence that low media richness leads to perceived obstacles to communication (Kahai & Cooper, 2003; Kock, 2004), which is consistent with the theory, yet it is obvious that media of low richness like email are widely used, sometimes even when richer media are easily available (Kock, 2005; Lee, 1994; Markus, 1994). Even though media richness theory was proposed a long time ago, well before the emergence of modern ecollaboration technologies and the Internet as we know it today, it addressed topics that are highly relevant now. It addressed the notion that characteristics of a communication medium may affect group work, which has been a recurrent issue in recent research (Alge, Wiethoff, & Klein, 2003). Media richness theory and its nonverbalcues-suppression perspective set the stage for the study of behavioral e-collaboration phenomena at the individual level of analysis, such as “flaming” (Alonzo & Aiken, 2004), and at the group level of analysis, such as group decision making (Baker, 2002). The theory has also motivated research into technological solutions to the problems associated with lean media (Briggs, 2002; Briggs, De Vreede, & Nunamaker, 2003). In spite of the large amount of research in connection with media characteristics and their impact on group tasks, there has been little empirical evidence that the adoption of a lean medium can lead to increased group outcome quality: a counterintuitive finding that goes squarely against predictions based on media richness theory (Daft, Lengel, & Trevino, 1987; Lengel & Daft, 1988; Markus, 1994). This article provides such evidence based on the study of five process-improvement groups in a New Zealand university. BACKGROUND