497053

research-article2013

JBC50410.1177/0021943613497053Journal of Business Communication[END SUBLIST][END SUBLIST][END SUBLIST]Jansen and Janssen

Article

Effects of Directness in BadNews E-Mails and Voice Mails

Journal of Business Communication

50(4) 362382
2013 by the Association for
Business Communication
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DOI: 10.1177/0021943613497053
jbc.sagepub.com

Frank Jansen1 and Daniel Janssen1,2

Abstract
In this study, we explore the effects of channel choice (e-mail vs. voice mail) and
message structure (direct vs. indirect) on the receivers perception of bad-news
messages. We conducted an experiment in which bad-news e-mails and voice mails
were presented to participants who evaluated their response to the messages via
a questionnaire. The results indicate that e-mail is more comprehensible, while
voice mail is more persuasive and effective for maintaining a personal customer
relationship. Furthermore, messages with an indirect structure (explanation bad
news) are valued more highly than direct messages (bad news explanations). We
also found interaction effects of channel and structure, the most important being that
the preference for the indirect structure is limited to e-mails.
Keywords
medium, channel, e-mail, voice mail, direct/indirect message structure, readers
evaluations

Introduction
In the early summer of 2010, Apples iTunes store received a complaint from one of
their customers, Eva. Evas daughter had downloaded asupposedlyfree application for Evas iPhone. However, a couple of days later, Eva found her credit card had
been billed for 109.99. She decided to send an e-mail to iTunes customer service:

1Utrecht

University, Utrecht, Netherlands

of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

2University

Corresponding Author:
Daniel Janssen, Communication Studies, UIL-OTS, Utrecht University, Domplein 29, 3512 JE Utrecht,
Netherlands.
Email: d.m.l.janssen@uu.nl

Jansen and Janssen

363

My daughter has downloaded a free game on my iPhone (Fishies) and now my credit card
will be charged for 109.99 euro. Now I see on my account that the same has happened with
Blowfish (89) which was supposed to be a free download as well. So whats going on here?

iTunes responded within 24 hours with the following e-mail:

Hi Eva,
My name is Sarah from Apple iTunes Support. I understand that your daughter purchased
Fishies and you were charged 109.99 when it was supposed to be free. I am sorry for any
frustrations this may have caused you, but I assure you I am more than happy to look into
this further for you.
I have reviewed your purchase history and confirmed the actual purchase of the app Fishies
was free; however, it was the purchase of Chest of 1950 Pearls which cost 109.99. This
is what is called an in app purchase. This means that your daughter made the purchase
within the app (or within the game). Sometimes, in order to advance to the next level in these
games, you need to make an app purchase, which in turn, costs money.
(...)
Seeing your iTunes Store purchase history and order numbers ( . . . )
I have refunded you in full for this purchase.
You will see a credit of 109.99, plus any applicable taxes, in three to five business days.
(...)
I appreciate your understanding. ( . . . )
Take care,
Sarah
iTunes Store Customer Support

This e-mail conversation is interesting for a number of reasons, two of which are the
expansion of the e-mail channel1 and the rise of new conventions and subgenres (cf.
Baron 2000). It also illustrates how business and business communication have developed. People buy goods online from virtual stores, pay electronically with their credit
card, complain by way of e-mails, receive electronic (and sometimes even automatic)
e-mail responses, andin this caseget their money credited back to their bank or
credit card account. And all this takes place in just a matter of hours. This also applies
to other interactive channels such as texting and Twitter, which use the written
medium, and voice mail2 that uses the oral medium. Not too long ago, customers in a

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Journal of Business Communication 50(4)

situation like Evas had to write a complaint letter and would then have to wait to
receive a letter back; this correspondence would have taken weeks.
In many instances, e-mails have simply replaced letters. People apply for a job not
by sending a letter of application or requesting a form, but by sending an e-mail or
filling in a web form. The same people may get rejected not by a letter, but by an
e-mail. The same goes for many other forms of business communication: new channels replace old channels and old genres rematerialize within those new media. This is
a gradual development that has been called remediation in media studies (see, e.g.,
Bolter & Grusin, 1999). E-mail may well be considered the most important new channel just because of its volume. As early as 2007, the research firm IDC showed a dramatic increase of e-mail volume worldwide, rising from 31 billion per day in 2003 to
a whopping 97 billion per day in 2007. More recent data from 2008 shows that the
number of e-mail users has risen to 1.3 billion, while the numbers of e-mails that were
sent, reached an estimated 210 billion.
The advantages of e-mail are numerous and often mentioned. E-mail is fast and
cheap and readily available for almost everyone. Organizations and their customers
can communicate all over the world at the speed of light virtually for free. Seen in this
light the success of e-mail is understandable. Sarahs e-mail shows how powerful this
channel can be.
But in a way Sarahs task was not too difficult. She had to convey positive news to
Eva and positive news does not put much constraint on media-choice. If you win the
lottery, you do not care whether people inform you by e-mail, telephone, letter, or
whatever other channel. This situation may be totally different in the case of bad-news
communication (Timmerman & Harrison, 2005). Would Eva be as content with an
e-mail if iTunes had not refunded her or would a more personal medium have been
more effective in that situation? The question then is: What are the companys other
options? Of course a face-to-face meeting would be the best choice. All the empirical
evidence shows that mediated channels is no match for face-to-face conversations
(Baltes, Dickson, Sherman, Bauer, & LaGanke, 2002). But in a modern-day business
world face-to-face meetings are not always feasible. That leaves two other possibilities, namely telephone and voice mail.
In this study we compared e-mail to voice mail. We opted for voice mail because
voice mail and e-mail are relatively new media. Furthermore, they share an important
characteristic: voice mail and e-mail are noninteractive and asynchronous channels.
Apart from this, they differ in one important dimension: e-mail is a written medium,
voice mail a spoken medium. In the next section, we will argue why a spoken medium
may be more effective for bad-news communication.
In this study, we focus on one genre, namely bad-news messages, and on two channels, namely e-mail and voice mail. Our main goal is to explore which of the two
channels is more effective for delivering unwelcome news to customers.
Furthermore, we are interested in the effects of structural directness on the reception of bad news. Giving an explanation for the bad news in a conversation is more
effective when implemented in a prophylactic way (before the bad news) than as a
remedy (after the bad news). The same applies to written bad-news messages in

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e-mails. Earlier research has shown that readers prefer to read the explanation before
the bad news (Jansen & Janssen, 2011). The question is, however, if listeners to badnews messages in voice mails have the same preferences.
In the next section, we will elaborate somewhat on the results of theoretical and
empirical studies of channel choice and message structure in order to give the research
questions and hypotheses in the next section a solid ground. In the Method section, we
address the methodological issues for this study and explain how our experiments
were conducted. In the Results section, we present the outcomes; this is followed by
the Conclusion and Discussion section.

Bad News, Directness, and Media Choice

In this section, we will give account for our decision to focus on bad-news messages.
After that, we will compare the two channels that we used in our experimentse-mail
and voice mailin greater detail. Finally, we will explain why we added structural
directness as a second independent variable.

Bad News
One of the major challenges in business writing is to communicate a clear message
while keeping the client happy and preserving the image of the organization (Bove &
Thill, 2000; De Jong et al., 2002; Janssen, 2007). It goes without saying that communicating good news, news that is favorable for the receiver, is a simpler task than communicating bad news, news that conveys information with unfavorable consequences
for the recipient, for example, denying an insurance claim or rejecting a job applicant.
Good communication calls for a cooperative attitude from senders and receivers.
However, in bad-news communication the interests of the speaker and the senders
conflict which makes cooperation difficult and communication more complex. Also,
the demand for clarity in the message may easily conflict with the need to preserve the
organizations image and the relationship between the organization and its customer.
The proper balance between clarity and good relations is an important theme in (linguistic) pragmatics, especially in politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987).
Furthermore, bad-news communication induces an interesting conflict of a more
psychological nature. Timmerman and Harrison (2005) observe that managers often
dodge tasks that entail conveying bad news to their subordinates (the so-called MUM
effect). And if not, they are inclined to distance themselves from the news and the
receivers by choosing a channel that masks their lack of involvement with the subordinates, a strategy that is also predicted by the hyperpersonal model (Walther, 1996).
It is exactly for this reason that e-mail is often the medium of choice for bad-news
communication: avoiding the receiver. Although Timmerman and Harrison suggest
that managers should resist these all too human inclination, research tells us that many
senders prefer e-mail for delivering bad news (cf. Sproull & Kiesler, 1986). What
we do not know is how medium choice in bad-news communication affects the
receivers.

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Handling bad-news communication is something every communication specialist

should master. For that reason, bad-news or crisis communication has become an
essential part of most courses in business communication all over the world. From a
research perspective, it is thus essential to study effective and less effective instances of
bad-news communication and the strategies that are used in it (Jansen & Janssen, 2010).

Channel Choice: E-Mail Versus Voice Mail

In this paragraph, we will discuss the relevant differences between the channels e-mail
and voice mail. This discussion will lead to two hypotheses: (a) e-mails are more comprehensible and (b) voice mails are more personal.
If we compare voice mail and e-mail, we see similarities and differences. E-mail
and voice mail are both relatively new channels, made possible by the computer and
its electronic infrastructure. The most fundamental difference between the two channels is that they capitalize on different media: e-mail on the written medium and voice
mail on the spoken medium, which entails that receiving means reading for e-mail and
listening for voice mails. The spoken medium is time-bound and the written one spacebound (Crystal, 2001).3 Listeners are, in a way, hostages of the speaker. They have no
other option than to submit themselves to speakers, and to process their words one
after the other. The permanence of texts gives readers more freedom of choice: They
may access the parts of the message in the order in which they appear in the text, or
they may not. They may peek ahead, reread (difficult) parts of the text, and so on. By
consequence, it is more difficult to understand a complex message in speech than in
writing (see Chaiken & Eagly, 1983; Unnava, Burnkrant, & Erevelles, 1994). The
field study by El Shinnawy and Markus (1997) corroborates these findings. El
Shinnawy and Markus report that their participants prefer e-mail when the messages
contain, for example, numerical data that are difficult to remember correctly. Therefore,
we expect the e-mails in our experiment to be more comprehensible than the voice
mails.
The next difference between the two channels has to do with the possibility to
transmit vocal cues. Spoken language conveys vocal cues; written language does not.
Vocal cues are informative in their own right. They inform the reader about stable
characteristics of the sender such as sex and age, and temporary ones such as his or her
sincerity and emotional state (Scherer, 2003). It is highly probable that receivers
appreciate this information because it helps them evaluate the interpersonal aspects of
the message, especially in bad-news communication.
Apart from the possible direct relevance of vocal cues, they are also indirectly relevant: The voice contributes to a feeling of copresence and it raises the risk of leakage
of unwanted emotions.
Written and oral media also differ to the extent that can convey a feeling of copresence. Co-presence and social presence are the terms for the receivers perception
of the senders presence in the communicative situation (Keil & Johnson, 2002; Rice,
1993). When receivers hear the senders voice, they will experience him or her as
more present and thus more involved in the interaction than when they read a text.

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Table 1. Differences Between E-Mail and Voice Mail.

Communication mode
Access
Vocal cues
Copresence
Emotional transparency
Message production

E-mail

Voice mail

Writing/reading
Divers
Absent
Low
Low
Easy

Speaking/listening
Only linear
Present
High
High
Difficult

There is not much empirical evidence for these claims, but research does show that
e-mailers are more self-absorbed and less interested in or empathic with the receiver.
For example, Watts Sussman and Sproull (1999) found less sugarcoating in bad news
transmitted by e-mails than in face-to-face and telephone conversations (see also
Sproull & Kiesler, 1986, and Kruger, Epley, Parker, & Ng, 2005). We may thus
hypothesize that receivers appreciate a copresence affording channel (voice mail)
more than a channel preventing it (e-mail).
Vocal cues are not only a chance for senders to communicate more effectively; they
form a potential risk as well. In the previous section, we mentioned Timmerman and
Harrison (2005) who concluded that the most suitable channel for the receiver (in
terms of interactional justice) should be the one that is most transparent in conveying potentially ambiguous information about the senders sincerity and involvement.
Receivers will wonder: Is the sender of this bad-news message sincere for instance
when he expresses his sympathy? When the listener senses those emotional leaks he
or she will be sympathetic toward the sender and more inclined to accept the bad news.
Finally, the production process of the message in the two channels differs. The
production of even a short message presumes that the sender takes a series of steps:
generate, formulate, and articulate the message (Levelt, 1989). For a literate person
this process is easier in the written medium than in the oral medium. The permanency
of writing enables him to divide the composition process in parts: making a draft first,
rethink the text, and revise it when necessary. This process results in a polished presentation where all production problems have become invisible in the final product.
Producing an immaculate voice mail is more difficult than writing a flawless e-mail
(Dingwall 1992). In spite of all the possible preparations (planning, making a draft on
paper), during the final act of speaking much can go wrong with hesitations, pauses,
restarts, grammatical errors, and so on as a result.
On the other hand, in everyday conversation we are very tolerant toward errors and
mistakes in oral communication. And the fact that receivers know how difficult it is to
leave a decent voice mail may influence their perception. They may evaluate voice
mail messages more positively than comparable e-mails.
At the end of this paragraph we summarize the differences between e-mail and
voice mail that may be relevant for the receiver in Table 1.

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Direct and Indirect Structure

As mentioned earlier, we focus on directness as an element of structure in bad-news
messages. A classic distinction in business communication textbooks on bad-news
messages is that between direct and indirect structures (Bove & Thill, 2000; Janssen,
2007; Jansen & Janssen, 2011). In the indirect approach, the writer buffers the news
by presenting reasons or explanations before the bad news. In the direct approach, the
writer presents the bad news first and the reason later.
The direct structure may have a positive effect on the readers comprehension of
the message. Britt and Larson (2003) experiments showed that complex sentences
(consisting of an embedded clause with a claim and a causative clause introduced by
the connector because), in which the claim was presented first were read faster than
those in which the reason was presented first. Furthermore, they found that claim-first
arguments were recalled more accurately and in the exact order in which they had been
presented than reason-first arguments.
Jansen and Janssen (2011) found the indirect structure to be more effective when it
comes to persuasion and effects on image. They found no differences in comprehension. Indirectness seems to make a direct appeal to the rationality of both the sender
and the receiver by giving the reader the opportunity to closely follow the reasoning of
the writer.
Jansen and Janssen (2011) came to their findings by experimenting with letters
and e-mails, written media. It is still unclear whether an experiment with an oral
medium like voice mail would lead to the same results. Unnava et al. (1994) found an
effect of presentation order in their experiments with oral (radio) and written advertisements, a primacy effect of the first argument in the radio condition. They explain
this effect by stating that that the listeners process and remember the first argument
and use it as a frame for the remainder of the arguments. In the written condition the
readers did not have to capitalize on order because they could reread the text, skip
parts, and so on.
Although there are substantial differences between our experiment and Unnava
et al.s we expect that directness has more effect in voice mail than in the e-mail.

Research Questions and Hypotheses

Based on our review of relevant theories and research, the following research questions and hypotheses can be formulated:
Question 1: Which channel, e-mail or voice mail, do receivers of bad-news messages prefer?
Hypothesis 1: E-mail (messages) will be evaluated as more comprehensible
than voice mail (messages).
Hypothesis 2: Voice mail (messages) will be evaluated as more personal than
e-mail (messages).

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Table 2. Context of Bad-News Messages and the Specific Topics.
Context of bad news

Specific topics

1 Electronic gadget cannot be repaired

2 Holiday trip is cancelled

3 Internal application is turned down

Broken iPod
Broken watch
Flight
Rail journey
For participation in an
(expensive) company course
For a higher position
IMR-scan
Taking blood sample
Broken telephone
Broken television set
Manager
Management trainee
In a pancake restaurant
In a gourmet restaurant

4 A medical test failed and has to be redone

5The repair costs of an electronic appliance are much

higher than first expected
6 The application for an external job is turned down

7A student who has a secondary job as junior waiter is

degraded to the function of dishwasher

Question 2: Which message structure do the receivers prefer: direct or indirect?

Hypothesis 3: The direct structure (bad-news explanation) will be evaluated
as more comprehensible than the indirect structure (explanation bad
news).
Hypothesis 4: The indirect structure will be evaluated as more persuasive and
more personal.
Question 3: Is the preference for a structure independent from the media? In other
words, is there an interaction between structure and media?
Hypothesis 5: The positive effect of the indirect structure will be more prominent in voice mail than in e-mail.

Method
Material
We created seven topics for bad-news messages in a business context. The gravity of
the bad news was in all cases intermediate, from a cancelled trip via an appliance that
turns out to be a total loss to the announcement that a student having a part-time job as
a waiter will be given a different task. For each topic we composed a primary message
and a secondary message that functioned as a replication and manipulation check. For
instance, we wrote a message about the high repair costs of cell phones and of a television set, and about a cancelled flight and a cancelled railway trip (see Table 2).
All e-mail messages followed the same format. This format contained a salutation,
a neutral introductory sentence, and either the bad news followed by three explanations or three explanations followed by the bad news. Then the messages ended with a
neutral statement, a greeting, and the name of the sender.

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Example of a Bad-News E-Mail

This e-mail message regards/concerns your reservation of a business class ticket flight
number CA 1773 for 15/2/2009 from Amsterdam to Toronto (Canada).
Regrettably, we have to cancel this flight for the following reasons: the airport of Toronto is
on strike that week. Besides, we expect extreme bad weather conditions in Toronto where
the airport will be closed for all flights for four days. At the moment, we are also encountering
some unforeseen technical problems with the airplane, which we are trying to solve as soon
as possible.
We apologize for the inconveniences and would like to propose an arrangement with you. You
are requested to contact Can Airlines for further information, telephone number 020340 74 24.
With kind regards,
Can Airlines
Jan-Peter de Vries, Client Manager

We presented the e-mails to our participants on a laptop computer, in a realistic

e-mail-makeup. The mean length of the letters was 186 words (minimum 180, maximum 191).
As far as the voice mails are concerned, their structure was almost identical with the
e-mails:
Example of a Bad News Voice Mail
Good day, this is Remon Spaas of Telfort Repair service speaking.
We have received your mobile telephone and examined it on defects.
The battery of your phone is broken. Furthermore the display has to be replaced because of
water damage. Besides this, the entire interior works has to be cleaned.
For these three reasons, the costs of repair of your mobile phone will amount to 315.
If you accept this estimate, please let us know by contacting our client service.
The phone number is 09009596.
Greetings

The only difference with the e-mail is the position of the senders self-identification.
As was mentioned in the introduction, the position of this internal self-identification
in e-mails is conventionally at the end of the message, namely in the signature. The
conventional position for self-identification in voice mails, however, is at the

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beginning, directly after the address to the recipient Hi/hello, Its NAME of the X
company (Goutsos 2001, Lange 1999, Knoblach and Alvarez-Cccamo 1992). For
reasons of ecological validity, we decided to follow this convention, by inserting This
is [NAME] speaking directly after the salutation. After the main body of the voice
mail text, the closing move consisted of closing and goodbye formulas, and again, the
name of the sender.

Participants
Of the 1,133 participants in this second experiment 533 (53%) were men and 600
(47%) were women. Given that fact that we used a 2 2 14 design (e-mail/voice
mail, direct/indirect, 14 different messages) this implies that we had 18 participants
in every condition. The participants were between 15 and 77 years of age: M = 27.0
(SD = 12.5). Randomization checks revealed that participants were distributed equally
in respect to their gender and age across all the conditions. Nearly all participants were
students of secondary vocational education schools, or had graduated from these types
of school. They had a Dutch cultural background and were all native speakers and fluent readers of Dutch. Nobody was paid for his or her contribution. As in the previous
experiment, we asked many participants to volunteer for the experiments during a train
ride as they commuted to work; others were recruited by our students in libraries, on
campus, at work, or at home.

Independent Variables
The first independent variable was channel. We presented our participants with badnews messages in an e-mail or voice mail format. The second independent variable
was the presentation order of the companys decision (the bad news for the customer)
and the explanation for it. The explanation included three independent reasons. We
had two main reasons for inserting an elaborate argumentation. By doing so, the
structural differences between the two conditions were as large as would be acceptable in a realistic setting. Furthermore, we wanted our participants to process the
entire fragment instead of peeking ahead or scanning the paragraphs until they found
the decision. To present realistic argumentation, we did a pretest in which readers
other than the participants in the experiment evaluated the plausibility of the explanation. The text in both conditions was identical, with one exception: in the decisionfirst condition, the phrase announcing the upcoming reasons was at the end of the
sentence; whereas, the phrase referring back to the reasons in the explanation-first
condition was at the beginning of the sentence, as in the following examples:
Example of the Decision-First Condition
The cost of repair of your mobile phone will amount to 315 for three reasons.
The battery of your phone is broken. Furthermore, the display has to be replaced because of
water damage. Besides this, the entire interior work has to be cleaned.

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Journal of Business Communication 50(4)

Example of the Explanation-First Condition

The battery of your phone is broken. Furthermore, the display has to be replaced because of
water damage. Besides this, the entire interior work has to be cleaned.
For these three reasons, the costs of repair of your mobile phone will amount to 315.

Dependent Variables
The effects of the independent variables were measured with a questionnaire by which
the participants could evaluate the messages (see the appendix). First, the participants
gave a general assessment of the overall quality of the message in the form of a report
mark (ranging from 1 to 10 as is the convention in the Netherlands) for the entire message. Then, they used the 7-point Likert-type scales and semantic differential scales
(1-7) to evaluate the messages on
comprehension; e.g., I understand the message completely (Items 2, 14, 16,
17, and 19)
agreement; e.g., I can imagine this kind of decision (Items 3, 4, 10, and 12)
positive sender traits, e.g., The sender impresses me as honest (Items 11, 15, 22)
attitude of the sender toward receiver (Items 8, 18, 22)
image of the company, e.g., My view of the organization is positive/negative
(Items 24, 25, 26)
In the last part of the questionnaire, we included a proposition that we used as a manipulation check for bad news (Item 27) and an open question to test whether the participant had comprehended the message (Item 28): Three reasons for the decision are
mentioned in the message. What was the second reason in your own wording? The
answers to this open question were coded as 0 for no answer or for reasons other than
mentioned in the message, and 1 for one or more reasons mentioned in the text. This
question was placed toward the end of the list to prevent it from causing the participants to attach more value to the arguments. Demographic questions about the participants gender and age together with two background questions about the estimated
importance of these kind of bad-news letters for the participants and their experience
with this type of messages completed the questionnaire.

Design and Procedure

We opted for a between-participant design to avoid contamination effects. Thus, all
participants evaluated only one message in one condition. The procedure was as follows. After greeting and welcoming the participant, the experiment leader presented a
written instruction:
Suppose you are a client of Telfort (a Dutch mobile phone company) and you bought a
telephone with a subscription a year ago. As this telephone has not been functioning well
recently, you have sent it to Telfort. A few days later you receive the following message:

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Table 3. Reliability of the Clusters of Dependent Variables.
Cluster
Comprehension
Agreement
Positive sender traits
Positive attitude sender toward receiver
Image organization

Propositionsa

Cronbachs

2, 14, 16
3, 10, 12
11, 15, 22
18, 21, 23
24, 25, 26

.64
.78
.74
.68
.86

a.The other propositions (5, 6, 7, 9, 13, and 20) could not reliably be attributed to any cluster.

Next the participant had the opportunity to ask questions and then the message was
presented to them onscreen. After the participant had indicated that he or she had finished reading, the text was made invisible, and they received the questionnaire.
Although there was no limit set to the reading time, most participants spent only
3 minutes on the reading task (M = 195 s, SD = 152).
Participants in the voice mail condition were allowed to listen to the message as
many times as they wanted, but almost no one made use of this opportunity. It took the
participants less time to listen to the message than to read it. The messages lasted
between 24 and 70 seconds (M = 43 seconds, SD = 16).

Manipulation Checks
Statistical analysis revealed that we could distinguish four reliable clusters of propositions (the dependent variables) in the data: comprehension, agreement, sender traits,
attitude of sender, and image of the company (see Table 3).
All have acceptable to good Cronbachs alphas, with .61 being a generally
excepted minimum for clustering (Field, 2009). Also, we checked whether the participants evaluation of the messages for each topic in the table was essentially the
same, which they were for all clusters (p > .05). Subsequently, we checked the
manipulation of bad news by analyzing the mean score for the proposition, The
message entails bad news indeed. The mean score was 5.6 (SD = 1.4) on a 7-point
scale, so we can safely assume that the participants considered the message bad
news. Furthermore, the participants had sufficient prior knowledge about the topics
in the messages (Item 32). The mean score for experience was 4.0 (SD = 2.1). The
participants did not consider the messages themselves to be important (Item 31)
considering a mean of 2.5 (SD = 1.6). We found no effects of channel and structure
on these three propositions (p > .05).

Results
As expected, the messages were not too difficult for the participants. The results show
that 790 of the 1,133 participants (= 70%) correctly answered Question 28 (see the
appendix). We also found no statistically significant effects of channel or message
structure (p > .05) on the number of correct answers on this question. So all messages

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Table 4. Means Scores and Standard Deviations (SDs) for Channel of the Clusters of
Dependent Variables (1 = Negative Evaluation, 7 = Positive Evaluation) and Report Mark (1 =
Low Evaluation, 10 = High Evaluation).

Report mark (1)

Comprehension
Agreement
Positive sender traits
Positive attitude sender
Image organization

E-mail

Voice mail

6.2 (1.5)
5.7 (1.0)
4.6 (1.5)
4.6 (1.2)
3.9 (1.3)
4.0 (1.4)

6.4 (1.3)
5.1 (1.2)
4.9 (1.3)
5.0 (1.0)
4.4 (1.2)
4.4 (1.4)

5.9
64.4
10.7
50.2
33.7
29.3

.015
.001
.001
.001
.001
.001

.005
.054
.009
.042
.029
.025

Table 5. Means Scores and Standard Deviations (SDs) for Structure of the Clusters of
Dependent Variables (1 = Negative Evaluation, 7 = Positive Evaluation) and Report Mark (1 =
Low Evaluation, 10 = High Evaluation).

Report mark
Comprehension
Agreement
Positive sender traits
Positive attitude sender
Image organization

Direct

Indirect

6.3 (1.4)
5.4 (1.1)
4.7 (1.4)
4.7 (1.2)
4.1 (1.3)
4.1 (1.5)

6.3 (1.5)
5.4 (1.2)
4.8 (1.4)
4.9 (1.1)
4.2 (1.2)
4.5 (1.4)

.011
.245
4.448
7.476
2.160
2.123

ns
ns
.035
.006
ns
ns

.004
.007

were relatively easy to understand, a conclusion that is in line with the rather low result
for the proposition that measured the perceived level of difficulty most directly,
namely Item 19 the message is difficult: M = 2.6 (SD = 1.1). The short reading times
of the e-mails and the absence of requests to replay the voice mails reported in the
procedure section point in the same direction.
The next question we need to answer is whether the channel, in general, has an
effect on the evaluation of the messages (see Table 4).
The results are unambiguous. We see two distinct effects of channel. First, the participants findas expectede-mails more comprehensible than voice mails. Second,
voice mail leads to more agreement, a more positive image of the sender, a more positively evaluated relationship and a better image.
Is there an effect of message structure as well? Does a direct structure lead to different evaluations than does the indirect structure? In Table 5, we present the mean
scores of direct and indirect structures on all dependent variables.
The effects of structure are less prominent than were the effects of channel. First,
the scope of the message structures influence is narrower, because structure only
affects agreement and sender image. Second, the effects we did find are considerably
weaker, as the lower eta squares indicate. The direction of the differences is identical

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Jansen and Janssen

Table 6. Means Scores and Standard Deviations (SDs) for Channel and Structure of the
Clusters of Dependent Variables (1 = Negative Evaluation, 7 = Positive Evaluation) and
Report Mark (1 = Low Evaluation, 10 = High Evaluation).
E-mails

Report mark
Comprehension
Agreement
Positive sender traits
Attitude sender
Image organization

Voice mails

Direct

Indirect

Direct

Indirect

6.1 (1.5)
5.6 (1.0)
4.4 (1.5)
4.4 (1.2)
3.8 (1.3)
3.8 (1.4)

6.2 (1.6)
5.7 (1.0)
4.8 (1.5)
4.8 (1.2)
4.1 (1.1)
4.1 (1.4)

6.4 (1.3)
5.2 (1.2)
4.9 (1.3)
5.1 (1.0)
4.4 (1.1)
4.4 (1.4)

6.3 (1.3)
5.0 (1.3)
4.9 (1.3)
5.0 (1.0)
4.2 (1.1)
4.4 (1.3)

5.9
4.1
4.5
11.7
7.7
2.1

.015
.043
.034
.001
.006
NS

for all evaluative dimensions: the indirect structure (decision last) is clearly valued
more highly than the direct (decision first) structure.
Finally, we tested whether we could find an interaction effect between channel and
message structure. By way of multivariate analyses of variance we evaluated if directness had a different effect in e-mails than it had in voice mails (see Table 6 for the
results).
The results in Table 6 show no interaction effect on the image of the organization,
but significant interaction effects on report mark, comprehension, agreement, sender
traits, and attitude toward the receiver.
The results in Table 6 show that direct voice mails get a significantly higher overall
evaluation than direct e-mails, indicated by the report mark. In other words, the participants appreciated to direct voice mail more than the direct e-mail.
Statistical analysis revealed no significant difference between the direct and the
indirect structure within the channels. E-mail is considered more comprehensible than
voice mail and this finding is even more prominent in the indirect messages where the
decision followed the explanation.
The other three clusters with significant interaction effects give a slightly different
picture. As for agreement, directness has no effect in voice mails (p > .05) but it has in
e-mails. Readers of a direct e-mail are considerably less inclined to agree with the
decision than the receivers of indirect e-mail, F(1, 572) = 7.8, p = .005, 2 = .014.
Furthermore, it turns out that a direct voice mail elicits more agreement than does a
direct e-mail, F(1, 568) = 14.6, p < .001, 2 = .025.
As for the positive sender traits, the pattern is roughly the same as for agreement
cluster. We see no effects of directness in voice mail. In the e-mails, however, the
direct structure leads to a less positive evaluation of the sender than does the indirect
structure, F(1, 572) = 16.7, p < .001, 2 = .028).
The effects of channel and structure on the attitude of the sender toward the receiver
are completely in line with the results on two previous dependent variables. Within the
voice mail condition structure has no effect (p > .05), but in e-mail it does. The sender

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of a decision last e-mail is considered more sympathetic than the sender of a decision
first e-mail, F(1, 572) = 8.3, p = .004, 2 = .014). The superiority of voice mail over
e-mail is more apparent in messages with direct structures, F(1, 588) = 36.1, p < .001,
2 = .06, than in messages with indirect structures, F(1, 581) = 4.7, p = .03, 2 = .008.
No other interaction effects were found; nor did we find a significant interaction of
any of the dependent variables in relation to age or gender of the participant.

Conclusion and Discussion

The outcomes of the experiment permit us to answer the first research question about
the receivers preference for e-mail or voice mail? Hypothesis 1 stated that e-mail
(messages) would be evaluated as more comprehensible than voice mail (messages).
Hypothesis 2 stated that voice mail (messages) would be evaluated as more personal
than e-mail (messages). Both hypotheses are supported by the data (see Tables 4 and
5). Our participants considered e-mail to be more comprehensible than voice mail, and
valued the persuasive and interpersonal characteristics of voice mail higher than those
of e-mail.
The second research question addressed the issue of message structure. Which message structure do the receivers prefer: direct or indirect? Hypothesis 3 states that direct
structure (bad-news explanation) would be evaluated as more comprehensible than
the indirect structure (explanation bad news). Hypothesis 4 readsthe indirect
structure will be evaluated as more persuasive and more personal. Although the effects
of structure were more limited and weaker than those for channel, our results support
the hypotheses.
Finally, the research question about the interaction of channel and structure: Is the
positive effect of the indirect order more outspoken in voice mail condition as
Hypothesis 5 stated? No, it is the other way around. Positive effects of indirectness are
limited to the e-mail condition.
Before we discuss the theoretical relevance of our findings we have to consider
some of the limitations of our study.
First, in our experiment we compared two channels and excluded face-to-face. We
had good reasons for this. First, incorporating of an unmediated condition in the design
would have been superfluous because we know beforehand what the results would be.
All the empirical evidence shows that mediated channels are no match for unmediated
communication, such as face-to-face conversations (Baltes et al., 2002). Furthermore,
the instantaneous feedback possibilities of face-to-face interaction would have resulted
in completely different and thus incomparable conversations. To study the effect of
voice the vocal cues had to be held constant and in perfect relation to the written cues
in the e-mails.
The messages in our experiments werealthough diversalso small and limited
to bad news of moderate gravity. This choice made our experiment realistic on our
view, because no sender would leave a voice mail for more serious bad news (e.g., a
dismissal or the death of a beloved one). However, we would encourage experiments
on other types of bad news (e.g., turning down an invitation or a marriage proposal or

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377

refusing to lend a person a certain amount of money). Furthermore, we would like to

encourage experiments with larger messages. Our voice mails and e-mails consisted of
no more than an introduction, the bad news, the three explanations, and a closing line.
This mini formatalthough realisticmay have had an impact on the comprehension
results (see also discussion).
Also, we used only two channels for the bad news. Extending the experiments to
other channels, in particular to other written media (e.g., texting, letters on paper, chatting) would be interesting, especially to answer the question whether the differential
effects we found should be ascribed to differences in channels or to differences in
media (spoken vs. written).
The most important limitation in our study may well be the following. All voice
mail messages were recorded by one single male speaker who as an experienced,
authoritative speaker spoke fluently without false starts and made use of pitch and
intonation patterns. It would be interesting to test a variety of speakers (male-female,
high pitch-low pitch, slow-fast) to see if their voice mail messages lead to different
results. Furthermore, the fact that the voice mails were optimal (nice sympathetic
voice, no hesitations or errors) is defendable because it enabled us to compare them in
a fair way with the e-mail texts, which were also flawless in style and spelling; but the
absence of speech characteristics like hesitations and false starts made the voice mails
perhaps less realistic. It would be interesting to repeat this experiment with voice mails
with filled pauses and other speech characteristics.
And finally, the specific linguistic and cultural background of our participants who
are speakers of Dutch in the Netherlands, may threaten the external validity of the
results. We see no a priori reasons why the evaluation of the two channels would be
influenced by cultural aspects, but the evaluation of message structure may be culturespecific. In Jansen and Janssen (2011) we explain why we think the Dutch preference
for indirect structure is a fortiori valid for other cultures.
But if we assume that our conclusions are valid, how can we explain the consistent
superiority of the voice mail message when it comes down to establishing good customer relations? In the first place we have to realize that the eventual usability drawbacks of voice mail were of little concern for our participants in the experiments
because the messages, in their written and oral varieties, were presented to them
directly. So the participants were not hindered by practical shortcomings of voice mail
such as in-boxes that are to find or open on some telephones, voice mail messages
often cannot be selected, voice mails may be empty because the caller did not leave
a complete message, and so on. So the differential effects of the channels in our experiment can only be attributed to the difference in medium: oral versus written.
An obvious explanation for the positive effects of voice mail can be derived from
medium richness theory (Daft & Lengel, 1984): The possibility of the voice mail channel to relay emotions by way of the human voice makes this channel more apt for the
sender to show empathy with the reader. This is in line with findings in Shapiro,
Buttner, and Barry (1994) that face-to-face and telephone contact promote interactional, interpersonal justice (Timmerman & Harrison, 2005).
Many other experiments point out the extraordinary quality of voice. Apart from
the classic experiment by Chaiken and Eagly (1983), we may refer to Keil and Johnson

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(2002) for the greater impact of voice mail (compared with e-mail) on the social presence of the sender and Gelinas-Chebat and Chebat (1992) for the effect of intonation
and speech intensity on the evaluation of commercial messages.
The results of a recently conducted additional experiment on a smaller scale (160
participants) point in the same direction. In this experiment we compared normal voice
mail messages with computer synthesized voice mail messages (with a typical flat
intonation contour). The idea behind this experiment was that normal voice mail messages would signal empathy while computer-synthesized speech would reveal no
information about the sender. The results support the idea that the presence of voice
in bad-news message contributes to the receivers sense of interpersonal justice. The
participants evaluated the synthesized voice mail message significantly lower than the
messages with normal intonation (Visser, 2011).
We can interpret our results within the context of the hyperpersonal model as well:
The higher evaluation of voice mail may be considered a sign of the receivers appreciation of the senders courage to use a channel that might expose him or her as insincere, or the receivers appreciation that the sender initially planned to call him up
(instead of using the MUM strategy).
Evidently, media richness and hyperpersonal are not mutually exclusive. So it is
possible that they apply both in this case: An oral message is more empathical and
elicits more respect from the receiver, than a comparable written message.
On the basis of the experimental evidence to date we are not yet in a position to
exclude another explanation of a more mundane nature. Voice mail may be considered
more attractive, because of its infrequent use. The participants were perhaps merely
pleasantly surprised by the fact that someone left a voice mail message in a situation
(communicating bad news) where e-mail is the medium of preference (El-Shinnawy &
Markus, 1997).
This leaves us with the final question about the effect of the direct and indirect
structure in e-mails and voice mails. Is there an explanation for the fact that the evaluation of voice mails turns out to be totally structure insensitive, while the indirect
structure in e-mails elicits a higher evaluation on the relational variables? Unfortunately,
we have only a speculative answer. It is possible that our participants, knowing that an
eventual replay of the voice message would be cumbersome, paid more attention to the
details of the message than readers did. If this had been the case the listeners may have
interpreted the explanations in the indirect structure immediately as signals for the
upcoming bad news, thus, blurring the difference between the direct and indirect structure. The listeners could have predicted the bad news correctly. We do not know yet if
this is a general effect of the indirect structure; but for now we consider it a hypothesis
that can and needs to be tested in future experiments.
For now we may conclude that in situations in which the relationship between senders and receivers is fragile, as is the case in bad-news communication, senders may
well consider voice mail as a medium. Although senders often choose e-mail to convey bad news to avoid direct confrontation, this study shows that presenting the same
information orally is beneficial for the acceptance of the message and the relationship
between senders and receivers.

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379

Appendix
Questionnaire
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.

Which report mark do you give to the message? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

I understand the message completely
The decision was sufficiently well-founded
I can imagine this kind of decision
I prefer to receive a message like this as a letter
The message could be shorter
I would react immediately to this message
The sender is self-confident
The style of the message is official
The reasons for the decision are acceptable
The sender impresses me as honest
I agree with the decision of the organization
I prefer to receive a message like this as a voice mail
I could catch on without difficulties
The sender is friendly
The goal of the message was clear right away
The message was complete
The sender adopts an arrogant attitude
The message is difficult
I prefer to receive a message like this as an e-mail

The sender is
(21)standoffish/involved
(22) Insincere /sincere
(23) Understanding/not understanding
(24) My view of the organization is positive/negative
I think the organization is
(25)Unprofessional/professional
(26)Reliable/unreliable
(27) The message entails bad news totally disagree/totally agree
(28)Three reasons for the decision are mentioned in the message. What was the
second reason in your own wording?
(29)Sex
(30) Year of birth
(31) Is this type of message important for you? Not important/important
(32)Do you have any experience with receiving these kind of messages? No
experience/much experience

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Journal of Business Communication 50(4)

Authors Notes
The authors are mentioned in alphabetical order. The authors have contributed to this article
(and the research) equally and both take full responsibility for its content.

Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Rosalie Brem, Sharon Brilman, Joy Hofman, Ilona Lawnik, Tomas de
Smet, and Annewil van Wijlen who helped in carrying the experiment out and Ted Sanders,
Mike Huiskes, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

Notes
1. We follow Lyonss (1977, pp. 67-70) terminology by using medium for the more general
distinction between oral versus written communication, and channel for the different message transportation and display systems within the oral and the written medium. As we have
incorporated for each medium just one channel in our experiment, the terminological distinction is of little relevance.
2. Rice and Danowsky (1993) suggest a terminological dissociation between voice messaging and voice answering. By voice answering, they mean the use of a spoken message
by which an absent receiver of a call invites the caller to leave a message. Voice messaging
is reserved for the manipulation of recorded messages, for example abbreviate, or revise and
resend them. When we speak about voice mail we mean the latter.
3. Baron (1998) doubts the relevance of dichotomies in this field. She presents the uses of each
old and each new channel in so-called spectra, which blur the clear distinctions present in the
dichotomy of Crystal (2001).

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Author Biographies
Frank Jansen is an assistant professor in the Communication Studies Unit of Utrecht University.
He has lectured in grammar, dialectology, and rhetoric at several universities. His current
research interests include the style and structure of electronic texts and politeness phenomena in
business communication.
Daniel Janssen is a senior researcher and lecturer in the Department of Dutch at the Utrecht
University and an international guest professor at the University of Antwerp. His main research
interests include cognitive and social aspects of writing processes and (improving) professional
communication. He has published several articles and textbooks on professional writing processes and on written and oral business communication.

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