Cultural values, media richness and telecommunication use in an organization1

This paper deals with adapting the telecommunication services of an organization to the diversity of individual value orientations related to culture. After a discussion of the processes linking telecommunication use to cultural values, we show on empirical grounds the relationship between the preference of the individual for organizational cultures and his or her telecommunication use (fax, email (electronic mail), vmail (voice mail) and telephone). The cultural values were measured for 223 individuals in a French company using Q sort with balanced block design while telecommunication use was measured through a diary method. The final analysis was performed on 799 internal communications of 145 individuals having access to the four telecommunication services. In particular we found that the use of new media was more related to an orientation towards innovation or reactivity or entrepreneurship than the telephone. Email appeared as associated to relation-oriented rather than task-oriented value and suggests that the amount of feedback plays a role in the process of telecommunications media choice. We argue that cultural analysis is not only an interesting complementary approach to information richness theory for understanding telecommunication choices, but can also lead to different decisions. As an example, we examine the decision to withdraw either vmail or email in a downsizing situation.