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It's one of the sweetest ironies of the Hightech age, but cold, heartless computers are doing for corporations what all the honchos and human-resources staff could not: They're making people feel intimately connected. And it's the very impersonality of the instrument that does the job.
Electronic communication takes away many regulators of behavior that exist among in-person groups: It's not highly structured, it cuts across hierarchies, its users are invisible, and it puts the emphasis on the message. The many work- and non-work-related electronic groups now flourishing in big corporations, contends organizational psychologist Thomas Finholt, of the University of Michigan, constitute a brand new social phenomenon.
Finholt studied the computer mail of a Fortune 500 biggie whose 100,000 workers belong to more than 700 in-house computer groups--56% of them mandatory groups on work-related topics, the rest discretionary groups on topics ranging from wine to movies to childcare. While 60% of the computer mail came from work-related groups, people responded most to the extracurricular messages.
