A new study conducted by professors Gregory Northcraft and Kevin Rockmann of the University of Illinois suggest that email, video conferencing and other means of communications meant to expedite productivity, can actually hurt it.

In 2006, the two professors co-wrote a section of a book called Ethics in Groups, which talked about forces that perpetuate and mitigate unethical behavior in groups. More recently, their collaborative work has appeared in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, a leading journal in the field.

A professor of executive leadership with a doctorate in social psychology, Northcraft’s view can be summed up in one statement as reported by Physorg.com. “Technology has made us much more efficient, but much less effective,” said the professor. “Something is being gained, but something is being lost. The something gained is time and the something lost is the quality of relationships. And quality of relationships matters.”

The new study involved 200 undergraduate students, who were tasked to perform two collaborative teamwork exercises. Some were allowed to work face-to-face while others were limited to communication via email and video conferences. As expected, face-to-face communications produced the best results, while email produced the least. Video conferencing was somewhere in between.

Physical presence instills trust among collaborators. “Face to face, people just have more confidence that others will do what they say they’ll do. Over e-mail, they trust each other less.” says Northcraft.

The findings are highly relevant to businesses today, which tend to use email and video conferencing more for the sake of expediency, and because more businesses now tend to be spread out geographically. These findings suggest that businesses need to balance their means of communications with face-to-face meetings in order to recharge relationships. According to Northcraft, physical contact has a half life.

In addition, emails are not only used to expedite communications, but also to serve as a reference point for accountability in the workplace. Collaborators are always ready to play the blame game when something goes wrong, which does not do well to elicit trust.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about Technology.