Is there more to email negotiation than email? The role of email affinity

Email has profoundly influenced the way we communicate personally and professionally and, for many, email negotiations have become a common, every day experience. While many studies have investigated email negotiations by relying on and discussing the characteristics of the medium, this paper focuses on the user's attitude toward the medium and its respective influence on email negotiation. Specifically, we investigate which dimensions make up negotiators' attitude toward email, i.e. their email affinity, and how these attitudes, in turn, influence the negotiation outcomes. In our scale development, three facets of email affinity are theoretically considered, empirically explored and validated: email preference, email comfort and email clarity. Our negotiation study contains a quasi-experimental email negotiation exercise where subjects were paired according to their email affinity. Email comfort emerged as a significant predictor of individual profit, joint gain, and different dimensions of subjective value. Theoretical implications and further research are discussed.