Understanding and Reducing Perception Gaps with Mediated Social Cues when Building Workplace Relationships through CMC

More and more people form and maintain workplace relationships through computer-mediated communication tools nowadays. When all interactions are mediated by technology, people’s impression of each other can be affected by the selective social cues transmitted by media. The way people present themselves through communication technology might not be perceived by their remote counterparts in the same way as they do. The mediated social cues could affect how people interpret the perceived action, further affecting impression formation and relationship maintenance between remote collaborators. It is unclear whether and how such mediated social cues cause perception gaps and how such perception gaps among different social connections play a part in relationship building in remote workplaces. The goal of my doctoral thesis is to identify the perception gap in computer-mediated communication and its impact on workplace relationship building. First, in a mixed-methods study in remote workplaces, I found that people’s perceptions of their strongly and weakly connected colleagues become polarized when their collaboration is mediated by different communication technologies. Next, I specifically focused on relationship building between potential collaborators, which is another type of weakly connected collaborators in workplaces, via videoconferencing. In a controlled online study, I found that ambient cues from virtual backgrounds cause different impacts on first impressions of remote collaborators and perception of self. With this doctoral thesis, I aim to provide design implications on designing social cues to reduce the perception gaps introduced by communication technology in different stages of workplace relationship building.