Discusses how electronic communication takes away many regulators
of behavior that exist among in-person groups. Cold, heartless computers;
Computer mail; More.
By
PT Staff, published on May 01, 1992
news & trends
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.
"It is possible that the discretionary groups, which were roughly
five times larger than the work groups, brought out a sense of play in
employees," Finholt reports in Organization Science (Vol. 1, No. 1). Or
it's equally possible that play abounds in the workplace anyway, and
computer mail only made it more visible.
In either case, the play is what's making today's companies work. A
model motivator, it lets people feel connected, gives them a chance to
display expertise, and lets them discover things they have in common with
others. Not bad for just a little old machine everyone thought would make
the workplace sterile.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): DREAM MACHINES: Computers that connect
wokers.
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