Computer-mediated cross-cultural collaboration: attributing communication errors to the person versus the situation

Abstract

Computer-mediated communication, such as e-mail, facilitates cross-cultural interactions by enabling convenient communication. During these exchanges, the absence of contextual or situational information may cause e-mail recipients to form dispositional explanations for behavior that might in fact be driven by unseen situational constraints. To gain insight into the manner in which e-mail recipients explain behavior, the authors conducted an experiment examining how technical language violations (i.e., spelling and grammatical errors) and deviations from etiquette norms (i.e., short messages lacking a conversational tone) affect a recipient's perceptions of an e-mail sender's conscientiousness, intelligence, agreeableness, extraversion, affective trustworthiness, and cognitive trustworthiness. This study also investigated whether the effects of technical and etiquette language violations depend on the availability of information indicating the e-mail sender is from a foreign culture. Results reveal that participants formed negative perceptions of the sender of an e-mail containing technical language violations. However, most of these negative perceptions were reduced when participants had situational information indicating that the e-mail sender was from a different culture. Conversely, negative attributions stemming from etiquette violations were not significantly mitigated by knowledge that the e-mail sender was from a foreign culture.