Tricky emails

This blog post accompanies the article “Mail and management” in Business Spotlight 3/2010, pages 36–42.

In "Mail and management", Bob Dignen focuses on how to use email to build relationships, influence people and manage conflict. In particular, Dignen looks at how individuals approach emails in different ways: some may be more task-oriented, for example, while others are more relationship-oriented. These different approaches relate to differences in national culture. For example, countries that tend to be more task-oriented include Germany, the US and the UK, whereas it is said that Asian and Hispanic cultures tend to be more relationship-oriented.

People from task-oriented cultures separate the task from the person. In their communication, information tends to be more direct and specific, with the person receiving the feedback being expected to discuss it, rather than passively accept the feedback. Note that, within this group of countries, there are also different degrees of task orientation. Germans, for example, tend to be more task-oriented than their British or American counterparts, who will often engage in more small talk than Germans when communicating by email.

On the other hand, in relationship-oriented cultures, the person and the task are not separated from each other, so comments about someone's work are often taken personally. Since saving face is very important to people of these cultures, it is often better to be more indirect when communicating about performance on projects or tasks. Further, a person from a relationship-oriented culture may be less likely to respond to feedback on their performance.

These differences are worth discussing with your students, who may have wondered why their emails — in which they wanted to build relationships, influence people or manage conflict — have not been received as well as they had hoped.

The way I suggest you use this article is given here in Business Spotlight in the classroom. What I also regularly do with Bob’s articles is design my own pre-reading questionnaire to allow my students to think about their opinions on the topic before giving them the article to read. We can then compare whether their opinions are similar to or different from the author’s.

The questionnaire I designed for this article is available as a pdf for you to download and use as a basis for  discussions with your students. 

  Email questionnaire

I'd be interested to know how your lessons on this topic go, so if you'd like to share with me, please feel free to leave a comment below or on The Business Spotlight Teachers' Group.