E-mail communication in Generation Y employees: A quantitative study of attitudes, perspectives and perceptions.

摘要

This partial replication study surveys the workplace e-mail-related attitudes, perceptions and perspectives of 346 employees ranging in age from 18 to 34 years (Generation Y). Prior studies with the same 278 item online survey in common, which includes an e-mail inbox exercise, also measured the extent to which common e-mail variables influenced the perceived importance of messages and associated e-mail tactics. Unique to this study is the Generation Y sample population and hypotheses associated with subject line length. Descriptive statistics are provided for 23 common email habits. A series of ANOVAs was performed to compare sender status groups with receiver message importance, likelihood of response, speed of response, and likelihood of saving the message as dependent variables. Random effects multiple regression was performed with the dependent variables of speed of response, importance to sender and importance to receiver. Random effects logistic regression was performed to predict message retention, filing, and likelihood of response. The high reliability coefficient of the importance composite score as determined in the original study was replicated. Results confirmed the criticality of email for workplace communication and the extent sender and email characteristics perceived as important affect email tactics. Findings add Generation Y's perceptions to prior results using the same survey and evidence for short subject lines as more likely to result in a reply. Of the 1730 emails analyzed, 25.9% of subject lines were one word, 64.7% were two to five words, and 9.4% were more than five words. Additional studies are needed to expand evidence to close the knowledge-practice gap relative to e-mail and to improve e-mail efficacy.