Reading electronic mail 19
------------------------------
Insert Figure 4 about here
------------------------------
The results in Figure 4 show, that there is only one case with respondents with a low
need for cognition and that there is only one case with respondents for which information
played a small role in performing their job. This could explain the fact that the cases are not
strongly clustered on the degree of the need for cognition and that the cases are not strongly
clustered on the extent of which information played a role in performing the job as well.
However, there is a slight tendency that participants with a high need for cognition read the
email messages more in their entirety and more thoroughly than the participants with an
average need for cognition.
Organization C. The participants deleted only 4.6% of the total number of email messages
(N= 572) without reading them. Furthermore, they read most email messages in their entirety
(85.4%). This means that 10.0% of the received email messages were not read in their
entirety. With respect to how thoroughly the messages were read, 67.1% of the messages
were read very thoroughly while the other messages were skimmed.
More than half of the email messages contained job information (55.2%). The rest of
the messages contained social information (24.1%), and organizational information (20.8%).
The participants received most email messages from peers (74.6%), followed by external
sources (15.1%), and middle management (9.6%). The participants received only .7% of the
email messages from someone of the top management.
Convention