Differences between Dynamic Face-to-Face and E-Mail Networks: Implications for New Forms of Collaboration

Abstract

Observing social changes in organizations and their effects on how employees feel about their jobs at a micro scale has been extremely difficult due to the lack of measurement tools. Using wearable sensors, e-mail data and daily surveys, we were able to study in detail how job satisfaction is affected by changes in communication patterns. The results from a month-long study in the marketing division of a German bank support our hypothesis that denser face-to-face communication is strongly linked to increased job satisfaction, while e-mail communication patterns do not relate to changes in job satisfaction. This has profound implications for the use of e-mail as a primary collaboration tool, since it implies that management interventions will have a greatly diminished effect if they can only effect electronic interactions.

Keywords: social networks, job satisfaction, kith, reality mining, sensors

JEL Classification: C8, M12, M54