Revisiting the Task-Media Fit Circumflex: A further examination of negotiation tasks

Abstract

McGrath and Hollingshead's Task-Media Fit Circumflex, which proposed that the negotiations tasks “best fit” highly information-rich channels, is widely accepted for more than two decades. However, this study argues that according to the task nature, different negotiation tasks shall “best fit” different media channels. A 2 × 3 laboratory experiment was conducted to test this argument. Findings suggested that higher process satisfaction, lower cognitive effort and higher negotiation efficiency would be created when text-based systems were used to execute more analyzable tasks. In contrast, less analyzable tasks best fit face-to-face or audio/video-based systems. Managerial implications are discussed accordingly.

Introduction

Negotiation is one of the most crucial business activities [7], [26]. The rapid increase in international trade and multi-national organizations has accelerated the prominence of negotiation due to the huge demands for negotiations across countries [29]. Traditionally, the two parties involved in a negotiation had to meet and talk face-to-face. However, the Internet has significantly altered the way people communicate with each other. Today, when there is a need to negotiate over a long distance, the two parties are able to talk on the Internet through a variety of media, choosing between video-based, audio-based and text-based systems [13]. Being acknowledged as a more convenient and cost beneficial approach [18], “online negotiation”, the process of negotiating via the Internet, and “negotiation support systems” (NSS), the information systems that support online negotiation, have attracted researchers’ and practitioners’ interest [38]. For example, Smartsettle (http://www.smartsettle.com/) and Cybersettle (http://www.cybersettle.com/) are widely used in the business domain, while Inspire (http://invite.concordia.ca/inspire/) and Negoisst (http://www.wi1.uni-hohenheim.de/negoisst.html) are often used by academics [32].

According to the media richness theory [3], [16], face-to-face communication is the richest channel, followed by the telephone, and finally written text. This is because face-to-face communication is able to deliver more information cues, such as body language, immediate feedback, and emotional interaction via eye contact, as compared with telephone communication [12]. Written text provides even leaner media richness than the telephone, by which the emotional states of negotiators may still be delivered via tone of voice [17]. Generally, it is agreed that the richer the media channel, the better the communication performance. However, some empirical studies have disclosed contrasting results. For example, Kinney and Dennis [15] reported that media richness had no effect on decision quality, time taken to reach a consensus, or user satisfaction. Similarly, Valacich et al. [36] found that communication performance did not differ significantly among four supporting media: face-to-face, video, audio, and text-based. More specifically, Yuan et al. [39] revealed that in an online negotiation situation, the inclusion of video into the text/audio-based system did not create benefits in the negotiation process.

McGrath and Hollingshead [23] thus proposed the “task-media fit hypothesis” based on the concept of the Task Circumplex [11], [22]. That is, task performance can only be enhanced if the task fits the supporting media. For example, if the task is to report the current prices of a hundred different products, a text-based message such as an email (a lean medium) may in fact be more efficient than online face-to-face discussion (a rich medium), in which tone of voice or facial expressions may distract users from recording accurate numbers. Although the task-media fit proposition may shed light on results that contradict the media richness theory above, only a small, albeit increasing, number of empirical studies has verified this hypothesis. Moreover, these empirical studies have usually selected two distinct types of task, such as intellective and negotiation tasks [25], [34] or idea-generation and negotiation tasks [14], in order to reveal the effects of “task-media fit” on performance. This may be because the Task Circumplex proposes that negotiation tasks have high information richness requirements, while the requirements of intellective/idea-generation tasks are low.

Notably, the current study argues that not all negotiation tasks have high information richness requirements. Different negotiation tasks, depending on their nature, have different information needs [24] and media richness requirements. To verify this argument, a research model was proposed and empirically examined. The research objective is three-fold: first, to verify that negotiation, a conflict resolution task needing high information richness proposed by the Task Circumplex, may still have different information richness requirements based on the nature of the task; second, to confirm the “fit” effects of negotiation task/media channel on the negotiation performance in terms of efficiency and cognitive effort; third, to reveal that when there is a “good fit”, negotiators’ satisfaction with the negotiation process and perceived decision quality, which have been neglected in past studies, shall be enhanced. In the following sections, the theoretical background, research hypotheses, methodology, statistical analysis and conclusion are discussed sequentially.