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Press cutting: Beware the e-mail dispute
16 March 2007
Unfortunately disputes have an unsettling habit of escalating when people communicate electronically rather than face-to-face or via the telephone, says Steve Curall, Professor of Enterprise & the Management of Innovation in 果冻影院 Engineering Sciences.
Curall is an expert on the topic of security and trust in the workplace and one of world's most published authors on the topic. He says he decided to investigate the subject after being harangued by colleagues with numerous stories about e-mail conversations that had spun out of control. 鈥�
"E-mail communication is almost unique in that it is asynchronous, textural and electronic," he says. The two parties are not present at the same moment, so the result is not a conversation but a series of intermittent, one directional comments.
Nor do you get the facial expressions of face-to-face conversations or video conferencing or the verbal nuances conveyed on the telephone.
In conversation people time their utterances with great precision, interrupting to show agreement or disagreement, coughing, spluttering and making approving humming noises as and when they think appropriate. All of that is lost in e-mail communication.
But an e-mail can be reviewed, that is the recipient has the chance to go over it again and again, and it can be revised endlessly by the sender before they push that fatal button. 鈥�
The reviewability allows one party to quote exactly and respond point by point, says Curall. 鈥�
The spiral of escalation occurs when each side reciprocates the other's aggressive actions, explains Curall. "As each side is exposed to aggressive behaviour by the other, they change their perceptions and attitudes towards each other. The other side is often seen as less mortal than oneself, different than previously thought, untrustworthy and perhaps an enemy." 鈥�
However the risks can be reduced by users being more aware of the effect that their e-mails can have on others. 鈥�
If you have to use e-mail then it is important to manage your reactions very carefully, says Curall. The other party may be acting because of the lack of social cues, because they have too long to brood over something or because they are confused by the huge amount of information your last blast landed on their computer screen. 鈥�
Tom Rowland, 'The Times'