Workplace Email Research Articles

�Write a Greeting for Your Email Here�: Principles for Assessing Interpersonal Workplace Email Communication

�Write a Greeting for Your Email Here�: Principles for Assessing Interpersonal Workplace Email Communication

Routine politeness in American and British English requests: use and non-use of please

Abstract This paper looks at the use and non-use of please in American and British English requests. The analysis is based on request data from two comparable workplace email corpora, which have been pragmatically annotated to enable retrieval of all request speech acts regardless of formulation. 675 requests are extracted from each of the two corpora; the behaviour of please is analyzed with regard to factors such as imposition level, sentence mood, and modal verb type. Differences in use of please between the two varieties of English can be accounted for by viewing this as a marker of conventional politeness rather than face-threat mitigation in British English and as a marker of relationship asymmetry in American English.

A 21st century plague of biblical proportions.

Modern medicine has eradicated smallpox, contained polio and is making significant advances in personalised/genetic medicine. However, we are facing a pandemic of apocalyptic proportions, and there is currently no vaccine or United Nations Charter to help address this issue. Following its insidious spread in the 1980s, the full impact of this phenomenon on civilisation has not been fully appreciated. It has slipped under the radar of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) classification systems. We all know someone who is affected by this condition, and society is struggling to cope with the acute and chronic morbidity that has ensued. I am, of course, referring to the problem of the workplace email. This article examines the problems associated with workplace email and aims to offer some strategies to help contain it.

Politeness in power-asymmetrical e-mail requests of Korean and American corporate employees

AbstractPrevious research on politeness tends to examine the inadequacy of non-native speakers’ pragmatic knowledge. In this study, we broaden our focus to the influence of different lingua-cultural values on politeness in simulated workplace e-mail requests of Korean and American corporate employees. By exploring differential perceptions towards power-asymmetry, this study investigates how and why politeness strategies are realized similarly and/or differently in and around the speech acts of requests in English. By quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing the elicited data, the study suggests that lingua-cultural values influenced perception and production in power-asymmetrical situations. Findings reveal that power is a more prominent factor than familiarity for Korean employees, but to a lesser extent for American employees when doing politeness in e-mail requests. Results showed that the underlying reasons for formulating requests differed not only between Korean and American employees but also between two Korean employee groups that differed according to depth of intercultural experience. This study contributes to recent research strands in intercultural pragmatics and communication by arguing that pragmatic strategies to express politeness in relation to power are culture specific with existing and newly reconstructed lingua-cultural values coming into play.

Critical Genre Analysis: Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity in Electronic Mail Communication

This paper examined how the employees of a private higher educational institution in Kuala Lumpur use their professional knowledge in carrying out their institutional practices to construct their workplace email communications. This study does not only investigate how every single email functions in the workplace, but also how they interact with other texts, genres and styles in the immediate and distant contexts of situation. Investigating intertextuality was carried out in relation to how and why the employees used previous texts in a new text, referential intertextuality; how and why they repeatedly used certain forms to respond to reoccurring rhetorical situations, generic intertextuality; and how and why the place discourse community used their professional knowledge to identify the authority of certain texts on other text, functional intertextuality. Interdiscursivity was examined by categorizing how and why the employees of the educational institution appropriated the generic resources of a genre to create another. The study found that the expert members of the place discourse community appropriated the generic resources of their verbal and written business communication genres to construct the emails. They creatively used their previous experience in carrying out similar tasks using other genres to create the emails. This was reflected in appropriating the generic resources of other genres to construct a hybrid genre.

Socio-pragmatic influence on opening salutation and closing valediction of British workplace email

This paper reports the findings from a study into the variation of (in)formality of opening salutation and closing valediction in the emails of a group of British professionals. Drawing on both the literature and data used in this research, a number of socio-pragmatic factors were identified for exploration in terms of their influence on the (in)formality of opening and closing formulae. With the use of multivariate regression analysis, 387 emails were examined, 2 discrete models built, and 24 independent variables investigated. Results revealed 13 of the independent variables as significant in terms of their impact upon the (in)formality of opening and closing forms. Greater formality of both opening salutation and closing valediction was driven by external communication, and the social distance between parties. Preference for informality of opening salutation was driven by conversational progression, and the use of politeness markers. Preference for informality of closing valediction was driven by conversational progression, and time elapsed between successive email turns. Contrary to the idea that closing and opening forms constitute optional elements of email composition, the results indicated that such devices were not used as mere skeuomorphs of earlier epistolary communication but served deeper socio-pragmatic concerns.

E-mail in the workplace: The role of stress appraisals and normative response pressure in the relationship between e-mail stressors and employee strain.

In many organizations, e-mail is an effective and dominant workplace application tool; however, research identifying its role as a potential workplace stressor remains limited. Utilizing the Transactional Model of Stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), 215 full-time administrative and academic staff at a university were surveyed about workplace e-mail. The aim was to study the effects of potential e-mail stressors on emotional exhaustion as mediated and moderated by person and situation variables. Results indicated that 2 distinct e-mail stressors—high quantity and poor quality (in terms of high emotionality and ambiguity) of workplace e-mail—were associated both with stress appraisals (e-mail overload and e-mail uncertainty) and with emotional exhaustion. Furthermore, the effects of the 2 e-mail stressors on emotional exhaustion were mediated by appraised e-mail overload. Perceived normative response pressure—a relevant aspect of the specific work environment—added to the explanation of emotional exhaustion and accentuated the positive effect of e-mail ambiguity on emotional exhaustion, although effects involving normative response pressure were not explained by the stress appraisals.

Monitoring Employees' Email and Internet Use at Work - Balancing the Interests of Employers and Employees

The increased use of email and the internet in the workplace raises important legal questions for workers and employers. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the legal implications of use by employees of workplace email and internet systems, with particular focus on employer monitoring of the use of email and internet and its implications for employee privacy.

"Analyzing gossip in workplace email" by Tanushree Mitra and Eric Gilbert, with Ching-man Au Yeung as coordinator

We spend a significant part of our lives chatting about other people. In other words, we all gossip. Although sometimes a contentious topic, various researchers have shown gossip to be fundamental to social life---from small groups to large, formal organizations. Adopting the Enron email dataset and natural language techniques, we present the first study of gossip in a large CMC corpus. We find that workplace gossip is common at all levels of the organizational hierarchy, with people most likely to gossip with their peers and that it is more likely for an email to contain gossip if targeted to a smaller audience. Also, gossip appears as often in personal exchanges as it does in formal business communication. Exploring the sentiment of gossip, we observe that gossip is in fact quite often negative. Our study provides empirical evidence of an under-researched yet important societal phenomenon and provides empirical insights by testing existing gossip theories originating from anthropology, on a real world large email dataset.

From once upon a time to happily ever after: Tracking emotions in mail and books

In this paper, we show how sentiment analysis can be used in tandem with effective visualizations to quantify and track emotions in mail and books. We study a number of specific datasets and show, among other things, how collections of texts can be organized for affect-based search and how books portray different entities through co-occurring emotion words. Analysis of the Enron Email Corpus reveals that there are marked differences across genders in how they use emotion words in work-place email. Finally, we show that fairy tales have more extreme emotion densities than novels.

The Relationship Between Workplace E-Mail Privacy and Psychological Contract Violation, and Their Influence on Trust in Top Management and Affective Commitment

This study used communication privacy management and psychological contract (PC) theory to see if employee concerns about e-mail privacy would influence their feelings of PC violation and trust in top management. In addition, this study examined the impact of perceived PC violations on employees' feelings of trust in top management and affective organizational commitment. A total of 251 participants filled out a Web questionnaire. Results were consistent with the theoretical perspective, as feelings of e-mail privacy were linked to perceived PC violations and trust in top management. These perceptions, in turn, were related to employees' feelings of affective commitment.

E-Mail Privacy in the Workplace: A Boundary Regulation Perspective

This study applied communication boundary management theory to examine employee responses to workplace e-mail monitoring. Specifically, a measure of perceived workplace e-mail privacy (PEP) was developed and fit to a model of antecedents and consequences. To accomplish this, the study used an online survey methodology to gather employee perceptions related to workplace e-mail monitoring. Results indicated that PEP is a two-dimensional construct capturing one’s proficiency at maintaining privacy and concerns about the organization’s ability to infringe on e-mail privacy. In support of the boundary management perspective, the data revealed that perceptions of workplace e-mail monitoring and PEP were related to the perceived quality of one’s workplace relationships, especially with top management.

Communications Privacy in the Military

In the wake of the 1996 case of United States v. Larson, in which the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces held that a service member held a right to privacy in her workplace e-mail, the Department of Defense issued a DoD-wide policy requiring DoD employees to consent to e-mail monitoring, interception, and seizure for any purpose - including law enforcement. With military members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan relying exclusively on government information systems to communicate daily with friends and family, the DoD policy arguably violates core Fourth Amendment privacy protections. Proceeding from a discussion of first principles in military privacy to the four seminal military cases involving communications privacy expectations, I address the constitutional implications of the DoD policy, exploring whether it unconstitutionally warrants searches for law enforcement purposes. I conclude with a normative appeal for military courts and the DoD to follow the Supreme Court’s reasoning in O’Connor v. Ortega and distinguish work-related from law enforcement searches.With both civilian and military law in flux over the scope of privacy expectations in workplace electronic communications, my aim is to provide timely, considered guidance to courts, policy makers, and practitioners in determining what service members should expect from a normative perspective as they use government information systems to communicate with family and friends.

Employee Perceptions of E-mail Monitoring from a Boundary Management Perspective

This research contributes to the growing body of literature exploring employee perceptions of workplace communication monitoring and surveillance by developing an explanatory model based on predictions derived from communication boundary management theory (CBM; Petronio, 1991, 2001). Specifically, this study explores the perceptions of workplace e-mail monitoring from a cross-section of 155 workers. The data suggest that when employees feel that there is a large amount of e-mail monitoring and believe that the monitoring is inappropriate, they respond negatively to top management. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Communications Privacy in the Military

In the wake of the 1996 case of United States v. Larson, in which the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces held that a service member held a right to privacy in her workplace e-mail, the Department of Defense issued a DoD-wide policy requiring DoD employees to consent to e-mail monitoring, interception, and seizure for any purpose - including law enforcement. With military members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan relying exclusively on government information systems to communicate daily with friends and family, the DoD policy arguably violates core Fourth Amendment privacy protections. Proceeding from a discussion of first principles in military privacy to the four seminal military cases involving communications privacy expectations, I address the constitutional implications of the DoD policy, exploring whether it unconstitutionally warrants searches for law enforcement purposes. I conclude with a normative appeal for military courts and the DoD to follow the Supreme Court’s reasoning in O’Connor v. Ortega and distinguish work-related from law enforcement searches.With both civilian and military law in flux over the scope of privacy expectations in workplace electronic communications, my aim is to provide timely, considered guidance to courts, policy makers, and practitioners in determining what service members should expect from a normative perspective as they use government information systems to communicate with family and friends.

Solar UV Forecasts

This study examined the effectiveness of solar UV forecasts and supporting communications in assisting adults to protect themselves from excessive weekend sun exposure. The study was conducted in Australia, where 557 adult participants with workplace e-mail and Internet access were randomly allocated to one of three weather forecast conditions: standard forecast (no UV), standard forecast + UV, standard forecast + UV + sun-protection messages. From late spring through summer and early autumn, they were e-mailed weekend weather forecasts late in the working week. Each Monday they were e-mailed a prompt to complete a Web-based questionnaire to report sun-related behavior and any sunburn experienced during the previous weekend. There were no significant differences between weather forecast conditions in reported hat use, sunscreen use, sun avoidance, or sunburn. Results indicate that provision of solar-UV forecasts in weather forecasts did not promote markedly enhanced personal sun-protection practices among the adults surveyed.

Workplace Privacy: Employee Relations and Legal Implications of Monitoring Employee E-mail Use

The tradeoff between employees’ workplace privacy and employers’ need to protect company assets, safeguard proprietary information, and avoid costly litigation has been receiving increased attention (Lee and Kleiner 2003; Mello 2003; National Workplace Institute 2004). This tradeoff often favors employers, as the legal system provides much leeway for employers to monitor employees’ electronic communications in the workplace. However, employers need to consider the effect such monitoring has on their employees since employee and employer attitudes about monitoring often diverge. In this article, we explore workplace email monitoring from both employee relations and legal perspectives and discuss implications for employee morale.

Greetings and Closings in Workplace Email

This article reports on a study of the use and form of greetings and closings in the emails of two New Zealand workplaces: an educational organization and a manufacturing plant. Using discourse analytic techniques, 515 emails were analyzed and a number of differences were identified. In the educational organization, where restructuring has resulted in low staff morale and a mistrust of management, indirect and socially distant styles of communication prevailed and greetings and closings were not widely used. In the manufacturing plant, the more extensive use of greetings and closings reflected and constructed the open and positive relationships between staff and management and the direct, friendly, and familial workplace culture. The findings suggest that workplace culture is a more important factor accounting for the frequency and form of greetings and closings than are relative status, social distance, and gender.

Business email

Workplace email is quickly evolving to keep up with those who use it---and perhaps to make way for the next killer app.

Efficacy of an E-Mail Intervention for the Promotion of Physical Activity and Nutrition Behavior in the Workplace Context

The purpose of this study was to evaluate a 12-week workplace e-mail intervention designed to promote physical activity and nutrition behavior. A pre- and post-test design was conducted to compare the effects of e-mail messages between intervention and control groups. Five large workplaces in Alberta, Canada. Employees with access to a personal e-mail address (N = 2121) were randomly assigned to an intervention (n = 1566) or a control group (n = 555). Physical activity and nutrition messages were based on social-cognitive theories. The intervention group received one physical activity and one parallel nutrition message per week for 12 weeks. The control group received no weekly messages. Each participant completed self-report measures of physical activity and nutrition related to knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors 1 week before (time 1) and 1 week after (time 2) the intervention. The intervention group was more efficacious at time 2 on measures of self-efficacy, pros, cons, intentions, and behavior related to physical activity. This group also reported more favorable changes in practicing healthy eating, balancing food intake with activity level, cooking meals with techniques to reduce fat, and avoiding eating high-fat foods. Effect sizes for all significant differences were small. E-mail is a promising mode of delivery for promoting physical activity and nutrition in the workplace. Further theoretically driven studies are needed.