Communication media choices in interfirm collaborations: When media richness matters

Research relying on media richness theory has explored the communication media used by individuals who perform collaborative tasks that involve equivocality, a situation characterized by ambiguous information with multiple interpretations. This research implicitly assumes that individuals have common goals and priorities for collaborating, and so they can expect to encounter only cooperative behavior by the other party. We extend the core ideas of media richness theory to an interfirm collaboration context characterized by mixed motives where individuals can expect to encounter either cooperative or competitive behavior depending on their partners’ motives for the collaboration. In particular, we examine the communication media used during the interactions between alliance managers who are working for different firms with potentially different strategic goals and priorities. We argue that in certain types of alliances, equivocality can affect how partners perceive each other’s motives for the collaboration by leading to two types of errors: unnecessary misinterpretation and suspicion that the other party has hidden motives for the collaboration when in fact they do not (i.e., type I errors) and failing to identify that the other party has hidden motives when they actually do (i.e., type II errors). While unnecessary suspicions can be avoided by using media with higher richness in general, only certain types of richer media can help identify hidden motives. Our findings indicate that alliance managers are not more likely to use richer media for more equivocal tasks on an overall basis, but they are more likely to do so only in certain types of collaborations in which such errors are more likely to arise, and only for certain types of richer media that can help address either type of error (i.e., type I or type II error). We discuss the implications of these findings for research on communication media grounded in media richness theory and research on alliance governance.