An empirical investigation of e-mail use versus face-to-face meetings : integrating the Napoleon effect perspective

As the range of ICT applications in business organizations grows ever larger and takes up an increasing amount of time, the question arises as to whether this could have an impact on meetings. This paper explores the extent to which the use of ICTs replaces face-to-face interactions. The data was gathered by telephone interviews from a sample population of 2,500 company managers questioned over a five-year period between 2001 and 2005. The results indicate that substitution of face-to-face interactions by e-mail only occurs in a few organizations (< 15 percent of cases), while a quarter of the sample population felt that ICT use had led to an improvement in meetings. This appears to confirm the superposition effect of different media or the so-called “Napoleon effect.”