A59. Rice, R.E., D'Ambra, J. & More, E. (1998). Cross-cultural comparison of organizational media evaluation and choice. Journal of Communication, 48(3), 3-26.

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Managers working in four countries reported the richness of five media, equivocality of 11 situations, preferred media for each situation, and cultural values. The richness and equivocality measures were reliable and unidimensional. Face-to-face was ranked as most, and business memos least, rich. Only E-mail and telephone preferences were significantly correlated with richness. Media preferences for face-to-face and telephone for each situation were highly correlated with the situations’ equivocality. Respondents from collectivist countries rated the telephone as less rich, and the business memo as richer, than did respondents from individualist countries. This research has two goals. First, it attempts to assess rigorously the psychometric and predictive components of media richness theory, as suggested by Rice (1993). Second it attempts to determin whether perceptions of media richness, and preferences for media for situations that vary in equivocality, differ across cultural values in organizational settings, as hypothesized by Webster and Trevino (1995).