Analysis of email management strategies and their effects on email management performance

Abstract

Through digitization as well as globalization, communication in the workplace has changed massively, and email communication is nowadays one important—if not the most important—communication tool. Many people at work, especially managers, feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume and content of the emails that they have to handle. Moreover, many emails lead to a sense of being strained due to regular task-switching and has negative consequences for fully utilizing an individual's cognitive capacity. These aspects of emails can result in cognitive overload, described as email overload, accompanied by lower work performance. Therefore, email management strategies are required that avoid email overload with its negative consequences and that increase email management performance.Previous studies have investigated single factors influencing the perceived email overload as well as specific single-item email management strategies that individuals apply in order to handle emails. Since email management strategies are best described by constructs comprising several items, this paper identifies for the first time a full set of well-validated email management strategies and their effects on email management performance. To obtain information about the individual email behavior of managers at work, a survey was conducted and factor as well as regression analyses were performed. The findings provide scientifically substantiated advice on which strategies can be used to improve the aforementioned performance: most particularly, by using the email client as a to-do list and by keeping the email inbox at zero. Explanatory approaches for these results are described against the background of cognitive theories.