Electronic Mail and Organizational Communication: Does Saying “Hi” Really Matter?
研究发现，随着电子邮件使用增加，组织整体沟通反而下降，其中丢失的多是问候等闲聊。这引发了对问候在组织中作用的思考，并提出了一个基于在场与缺席、可用与不可用的沟通矩阵。
When people use electronic mail, they can communicate even when they are not physically or temporally proximate. Thus, it is not surprising that most studies report that the use of electronic mail increases organizational communication. In the study presented here, overall organizational communication declined as use of electronic mail increased. As we probed the nature of this decline, we discovered that much of the lost communication was greetings. This raises questions about the role that greetings, and other forms of casual conversation, play in an organization. To organize our insights about this topic we formulate a two-by-two communication matrix based on presence versus absence and availability versus unavailability. Prior research focuses on the ways being present and available and being absent but available through electronic mail affect the performance of specific communication tasks. Using our typology, we direct attention to the role of casual conversation in presence availability and to the parts that presence unavailability and absence unavailability can play in organizational communication.