Effects of Media Characteristics on User Satisfaction

Introduction
• Virtual teams are used to support business
processes
• It is important to understand people’s satisfaction
• Dissatisfied people are less likely to adopt a
technology (Reinig, 2003; Simon et al., 1996).
Introduction (cont.)
• Previous studies examined the effect of media on
user satisfaction on the media level
•Our study investigates the media on the attribute
level
 Instant Messaging (email vs. telephone).
Research Question
How do media characteristics influence user
satisfaction?
Literature Review
• Satisfaction: an affective arousal with a positive
valence on the part of an individual towards
some object (Briggs et al., 2006).
•Process satisfaction: towards the
procedures and tools used in the
communication process
•Outcome satisfaction: towards the outcome
of the communication process
Literature Review (cont.)
•Media Synchronicity Theory: breaks the black
box of medium (Dennis et al., 2008)
 Velocity
 Symbol sets
 Parallelism
 Rehearsability
 Reprocessability
Literature Review (cont.)
• Social presence: the degree of salience of the
other person in the interaction and the
consequent salience of the interpersonal
relationship (Short et al., 1976).
 the degree of person-to-person awareness in an
interaction.
Research Model
Hypotheses
 H1: Transmission velocity is positively associated with social
presence.
 H2: Parallelism is negatively associated with social presence.
 H3: Natural symbol sets is positively associated with social
presence.
 H4: Rehearsability is positively associated with social
presence.
 H5: Reprocessability is negatively associated with social
presence.
Hypotheses (cont.)
• H6: Social presence is positively associated with
process satisfaction.
• H7: Social presence is positively associated with
outcome satisfaction.
Method
• A lab experiment
 2 x 2 (idea generation vs. negotiation task) and
medium (text vs. audio)
 An entry-level business class
 288 students
Procedures
• Randomly assigned to one of the four
treatments; trained on MS NetMeeting
 university parking vs. desert survival
 text messaging vs. audio
• Filled a short survey
Analysis and Results
• PLS Graph is used
•Measurement model
• Reliability above .700
• AVE above .500
• Loadings above .600

Discussion
• Examines the effect of media characteristics on
user satisfaction
• The negative effect of parallelism on social
presence was not significant
 Only allowed participants to talk to one partner; not
enough variance in parallelism
Contribution
• Theoretical contribution
 Insightful understanding on how various media
characteristics influence satisfaction
• Practical contribution
 Correctly configure the media