Media Richness Theory

Media Richness Theory

                                          Media Richness Theory argued that managers could improve performance by matching media characteristics to the characteristics of the tasks. It contended that media varied in information richness (later called media richness), defined as the ability to change understanding within a time interval. MRT theorized that four factors influenced media richness: the ability of the medium to transmit multiple cues (e.g., vocal inflection, gestures), immediacy of feedback (how rapidly the medium enables receivers to respond to messages), and language variety (e.g., words, mathematics, art), and the personal focus of the medium (the ability to personalize the message to the receiver). Richer media (such as face-to-face conversations) enable users to communicate more quickly and to better understand ambiguous messages compared to leaner media (such as written memos). Therefore, according to the theory, the use of richer media would lead to better performance on equivocal tasks—tasks that have multiple and possibly conflicting interpretations of the available information—thus presenting a challenge for participants to arrive at a shared meaning. In contrast, leaner media were better for low equivocality tasks because rich media provided communicators with too much information and superfluous messages. Thus MRT argued that the use of richer media would lead to better performance for equivocal tasks (such as deciding whether to acquire a company), while use of leaner media would lead to better performance for less equivocal tasks (such as determining customer reactions to product labels). MRT is imprecise about the definition of performance, but in later works, Daft and Lengel discuss performance in three terms: making better decisions (effectiveness), making better use of time (efficiency), and establishing shared systems of meaning (consensus among participants).

Despite the empirical evidence to the contrary, MRT still enjoys high face validity among managers. There is an intuitive belief that richer media should be better than leaner media for equivocal tasks and that this should influence the media people choose. Although MRT is a well-established theory, it should be used with care given the paucity of empirical support for it.