Communication Channels and Employee Characteristics: An Investigation

This study investigates the perceptions of 509 employees of nine Kuwaiti companies about the effectiveness of communication channels they have used while sharing information or knowledge with their coworkers. It was hypothesized that selected employee characteristics—nature of work, length of employment, age, educational qualifications, and gender—are significantly associated with their choice and use of ten communication channels. Data were collected using an instrument that listed communication channels, used in earlier studies. One-way ANOVA tests, together with LSD post-hoc, were administered to test five sub-hypotheses. The findings supported the hypotheses partially. Nature of work was significantly associated with six of the ten channels, gender with five, length of employment with three, and each of the age and educational qualifications with two of the media. It was further found that Kuwaiti employees perceived formal documents and formal one-to-one and group meetings to be most effective media of communication. Telephone communications were perceived to be less effective than face-to-face, text, and email communications.