You Said What? Assessing the Impact of Collaboration Technologies and Message Characteristics Using Physiological Measures

Collaboration technologies often are effective but sometimes they can distort messages, especially in emotional communication. We propose and test a theoretical model to explain how different technologies and message characteristics influence the emotional responses of recipients and how recipients evaluate the emotional content of the messages. Two collaboration technologies - email and voicemail - were examined because they differ in richness and naturalness. As some individuals are more capable in interpreting and understanding emotion, we also examined the role of emotional intelligence. The results show that a message sent via email was likely to trigger a different immediate psycho physiological emotional response and be evaluated differently by the recipient than the same message sent using voicemail, depending on the content of the message, its tone, and the emotional intelligence of the recipient.