An Exploratory Study of Electronic Mail as a Rich Communication Medium in a Global Virtual Organization

* All authors contributed equally to this paper. The authors would like to thank the Centre for International Business Studies, the Faculty of Management at the University of Manitoba, and the Richard Ivey School of Business for funding part of the data collection and analysis. The authors would also like to thank the Mennonite Central Committee for providing access to the data and previous reviewers of this manuscript for their feedback. Abstract This paper explores how intra-organizational communication in a global virtual organization was impacted as the dominant communication mode evolved, from postal messages to facsimile to electronic mail, over a ten year period. Drawing on theories of communication media, we have proposed that changes in organizational communication mode will affect the nature and outcomes of organizational communication in terms of message frequency, message length, message cycle time, participation rate, idea generation, information gathering, social orientation, and decision-making speed. To test these propositions, we analyzed a dataset containing 907 written documents (187 regular post, 407 fax, and 312 email), collected from the archives of a global organization between 1989 and 1999. Results show support for e-mail as a rich communication medium compared with other written media, particularly in terms of increased participation rates, idea generation, socially-oriented communication, and decision-making speed.