Relating Electronic Mail Use and Network Structure to R&D Work Networks and Performance

Abstract:

This study analyzes computer-monitored and self-reported electronic mail usage and network data collected over time from mentors and their summer interns at an R&D organization. Amount and network measures of E-mail usage were significantly associated with work and work familiarity networks. As time passed, interns communicated through E-mail more outside their formal mentor-intern relations. However, amount of E-mail use and most E-mail network measures (such as centrality)were not related to mentors’ assessments of interns’ performance several months later. An intriguing exception was how interns were located in the overall E-mail network. Surprisingly, overall, most forms of communication were negatively associated with performance ratings. These results imply that it is not necessarily how much one uses an E-mail system, but how the users are positioned in that system’s structural context, that may affect R&D performance.

Key Words and Phrases::

• diffusion
• electronic mail
• implementation
• information systems
• network analysis
• organizational computer-mediated communication
• organizational structure
• R&D networks
• R&D performance

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ronald E. Rice

Ronald E. Rice is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Rutgers University. He received his M.A. and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He has corporate experience in systems and communication analysis, banking operations, data processing management, publishing, and statistical consulting. He has coauthored or coedited Public Communication Campaigns, The New Media: Communication, Research and Technology, Managing Organizational Innovation, and Research Methods and the New Media. Dr. Rice has conducted research and published widely in communication science, public communication campaigns, computer-mediated communication systems, methodology, organizational and management theory, information systems, information science and bibliometrics, and social networks.