Gender Differences in the Effects of Media Richness

Abstract

Media richness theory argues that performance improves when team members use “richer” media for equivocal tasks. Virtually all research on media richness theory has focused on perceptions: surveys of individuals’beliefs about media rather than investigating actual performance with richer versus leaner media. This experiment studied the effects of media richness on decision making in two-person teams (all male, all female, and mixed gender) using one form of “new media” (computer-mediated communication). Participants took longer to make decisions with computer-mediated communication. Matching richness to task equivocality only resulted in better performance for the all-female teams, likely because females are more sensitive to nonverbal communication and more affected by its absence in computer-mediated communication. For remaining teams, using richer face-to-face communication did not improve performance to a greater extent for more equivocal than less equivocal tasks. Results support media richness theory only for all-female teams.