The Message You Meant to Send Never Arrived: How Email and Text Fuel Workplace Conflict

What research says about text, email, phone, and face-to-face communication

By Kimberly Best, RN, MA | Founder, Best Conflict Solutions | bestconflictsolutions.com

I just went down a rabbit hole.

I’m working on a presentation for a Chamber of Commerce event this week and I know that talking about conflict can make some folks a little uncomfortable. It’s a hard topic for a lot of us. So, I wanted to make the conversation fun. Note: I recently did a trivia game on conflict in healthcare for a nursing association. The person who won only got 50% of the answers correct (which says something about the gap in organizational conflict management knowledge that might be a source of change). It was a lot of fun for everybody. Probably didn’t hurt that the winning gift basket contained a bottle of wine.

For this group, I decided to do a Myth or Fact game. And that’s where the rabbit hole got deep.  I often share, “Email in anger and you’ll send the best email you’ll ever regret.” (Fact!) This made me wonder about text, too.  I started digging into research on how we typically communicate at work, and specifically what happens to our messages when we send them by text, email, phone, or face-to-face. 

What I found was eye-opening. I want to share it with you.

Think About Your Last Workplace Conflict

How did it start? If you’re like most people, the answer is an email. Or a text. Maybe a Slack message that landed wrong. A two-word reply that felt dismissive. A forwarded message that made you wonder what was being said behind your back.

We send dozens of digital messages a day and assume the other person is reading them exactly the way we intended. We’re wrong about that more often than we realize. And we have no idea we’re wrong. That’s what makes it so dangerous.

I saw this pattern long before the research confirmed it. As a critical care nurse, I watched a nurse leave a terse message for another nurse. Nurse-2 would read frustration where none existed. By the time they were in the same room, the damage was done. The conflict wasn’t caused by anything either person intended. It was caused by the medium they used to communicate.

It turns out researchers have been studying this question for over twenty years. The findings are consistent, nuanced, and if you manage people, lead teams, or care about your relationships, they may change how you communicate starting today.

The Study That Started It All

In 2005, researchers Justin Kruger and Nicholas Epley at NYU and the University of Chicago published a landmark study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They ran five experiments testing whether people could accurately convey and interpret tone over email.

What they found was striking. Email recipients correctly identified the sender’s intended tone only about 56% of the time. That’s barely better than flipping a coin. But here’s where it gets interesting: both senders and receivers were confident they’d gotten it right about 90% of the time.

Communication is made up of intent and impact. You’re flipping a coin on whether your message landed the way you intended, and you’re 90% sure you nailed it. That gap between confidence and accuracy is where workplace conflict is born.

The researchers attributed this to egocentrism, not in the selfish sense, but in the cognitive sense. When you write an email, you hear your own tone in your head. You hear the warmth, the humor, the sarcasm, the sincerity. But the reader doesn’t have your voice in their head. They only have words on a screen.

Twenty Years of Research: What Came Next

Now, the Kruger and Epley study is twenty years old. It used strangers in a lab passing prepared statements back and forth. Fair to ask: does this hold up in real life, with people who actually know each other?

Researchers have been asking that question ever since. And the answer turns out to be more nuanced than a simple yes or no.

In 2008, Kris Byron at Syracuse University published a theoretical framework in the Academy of Management Review (now cited over 350 times) arguing that email receivers tend to interpret messages as more emotionally negative or neutral than the sender intended. Byron found that the absence of nonverbal cues combined with delayed feedback compounds misinterpretation. She also found something that mirrors the Kruger and Epley confidence gap: people can identify when a coworker has inaccurately conveyed emotion in an email, but they cannot identify when they’ve done the same thing themselves.

In 2021, Sillars and Zorn published a study in Management Communication Quarterly that documented what they call a “negative intensification bias.” They had people share workplace emails they’d found upsetting, then showed those same emails to outside observers. The receivers consistently perceived the emails as more negative than the observers did. (This happens quite often when I’m working in conflict management.) And here’s the important part: the receivers’ negative ratings had only a weak relationship to what was actually in the message. The words themselves weren’t driving the reaction. The receiver’s context was. The bias was worse in poor communication climates – like when there is already conflict- and among people in subordinate positions.

That finding matters. It means misinterpretation isn’t just about the words. It’s about the relationship, the perceived history, the power dynamics, and the culture people are reading those words inside of.

Then in 2025, researchers Pollmann and Roos at Tilburg University published a study that pushed back on the whole premise. They tested real-world messages between people who actually know each other, like coworkers and friends. Across two studies with over 700 participants, they found no significant misunderstanding. Receivers and senders rated the emotional tone of messages in close agreement. The researchers concluded that in everyday communication between non-strangers, people can and do accurately interpret emotional tone in text-based messages. It's worth noting, though, that the study looked at routine, everyday messages. It did not test what happens when the relationship is strained, when there's unresolved conflict, or when the message itself is emotionally charged. That's a different conversation, and as the other research shows, a very different outcome. So which is it? Are we terrible at reading emails, or are we fine?

Both. And That’s the Point.

Here’s what twenty years of research actually tells us: in comfortable, routine communication between people who know each other well, we do just fine. The everyday “see you at 3” and “sounds good” and “great meeting today” messages land the way they’re intended. Context, shared history, and relationship, especially if it’s good, fill in the gaps.

But that’s not when miscommunication causes damage.

The damage happens at the edges. When the people don’t know each other well. When there’s a power imbalance. When the workplace culture is already strained. When the message is emotionally loaded, or ambiguous, or brief. When the relationship is already in conflict.

That’s exactly when people reach for email instead of picking up the phone. And that’s exactly when email fails them most.

The “Nice Job” Problem

So where does the misunderstanding actually show up? Communication expert Nick Morgan, author of the Harvard Business Review Press bestseller, Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World, looked at exactly this. According to Morgan, people think others understand their messages 90% of the time, but the actual success rate is closer to 50%. That gap lives in the kinds of messages we just talked about: the ones that are brief, ambiguous, or emotionally loaded.

Morgan also reports something worth sitting with: recipients of a two-word message like “nice job” or “great work” interpret it as sarcastic 60% of the time. You sent a compliment. They received a slight. And you walked away thinking you’d just made someone’s day.

This isn’t a minor misunderstanding. It’s a trust erosion you didn’t know was happening.

The Brevity Trap: When Being Efficient Reads as Being Rude

I can be guilty of this one, myself.  Sometimes, I’m in a hurry and become a brief communicator. Get to the point, say what needs to be said, move on. Efficient, right? Not always.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago published a study in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology that identified two distinct types of email rudeness: active and passive. Active rudeness is the obvious kind, like demeaning remarks or all-caps shouting. But passive rudeness is sneakier. It’s the short, insufficient reply. The single-word response to a thoughtfully written email. “Noted.” “Received.” “Okay.” Ignoring part of someone’s message. Not responding at all.

Here’s the part that surprised me: passive rudeness was linked to insomnia more than actively rude emails. The researchers explained that uncertainty plays a critical role in keeping people up at night. An overtly rude email is unpleasant, but at least you know where you stand. A terse, ambiguous reply leaves you guessing. Was that dismissive or just busy? Are they annoyed or just efficient? Did they even read my whole email?

That uncertainty follows people home. They reread the message. They check for a response that never comes. And because emails are stored, they can revisit that moment of distress over and over. The researchers also found that more than 90% of professionals have reported experiencing disrespectful email communication at work. Most of the people sending those emails have no idea they’re being perceived as rude. They’re being efficient. They’re being brief. They’re multitasking. But the person on the other end is lying awake at 2 a.m. wondering what they did wrong.

Even punctuation plays a role. A 2025 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that ending a single-word text with a period, like “yup.” instead of “yup”, was perceived as conveying abruptness or insincerity. A single punctuation mark changed the meaning of the message.

If you’re a brief communicator like me, this is worth paying attention to. Brevity without warmth reads as coldness. An extra sentence costs you five seconds. Silence after someone’s email costs you their trust.

Email Leads the Pack in Workplace Miscommunication

A 2023 survey by Preply of 1,030 U.S. employees puts numbers to the pattern. When asked which communication channels have led to miscommunication at work, the text-based methods clustered together at the top: email at 87%, text messages at 80%, and direct messaging at 79%. The voice-based channels were noticeably lower: phone calls at 71% and voice messages at 67%.

The gap isn't between email and everything else. It's between communication with a voice and communication without one. The less your recipient can hear you, the more likely your message lands wrong.

Phone Calls Are Better. Face-to-Face Is Best.

The Kruger and Epley research program also compared email to voice. When the same messages were delivered by voice instead of text, accuracy jumped to about 75%. Adding tone of voice back into the equation gives the listener critical information about how to interpret the words.

Face-to-face communication is where accuracy climbs highest. When you can see someone’s face, read their body language, hear their tone, and respond in real time, the full picture comes into focus. One analysis of conflict resolution across communication channels found that face-to-face communication achieves an 85% success rate, while text-based conflict resolution succeeds only about 35% of the time. Text arguments took an average of 8.5 hours to resolve compared to 2.5 hours in person.

A peer-reviewed study published in 2023, tracking 411 participants across nearly 10,000 daily questionnaires, found that face-to-face contact was positively associated with well-being, while communication through messaging apps had a negative association. The more life-like the communication, the less lonely, less sad, more supported, and more happy people felt.

The hierarchy is clear. Face-to-face is the gold standard. Phone calls recover much of what’s lost. Email and text are the riskiest channels for anything involving emotion, nuance, or conflict.

What About That “93% of Communication Is Nonverbal” Statistic?

This one I definitely wanted to understand.  You’ve probably heard it in a training: 93% of communication is nonverbal. It’s one of the most widely cited statistics in business communication, and also one of the most misunderstood.

The statistic comes from researcher Albert Mehrabian, who published his findings in 1971. What Mehrabian actually found was that when people communicate feelings and attitudes, words carry about 7% of the meaning, tone of voice carries 38%, and facial expression carries 55%. But Mehrabian himself has clarified that these numbers apply only to communication about feelings and attitudes, not to all communication. He never intended the ratio to be applied broadly, and he has publicly said so.

So why does this matter for your next email? Because conflict is always about feelings and attitudes. Every difficult conversation at work is loaded with emotion, even when people are trying to keep it professional. That’s exactly the context where tone and facial expression carry the most weight, and where email strips them away entirely.

You don’t need the exact percentages to understand the point. When emotions are involved, words alone are not enough. And in conflict, emotions are always involved.

Why Our Brains Make This Worse

There’s a biological reason this keeps happening. Our brains are wired to fill in missing information, and they almost never fill it in generously. In the absence of tone and facial cues, our brains default to the negative interpretation. This is the same negativity bias that kept our ancestors alive by assuming the rustling in the bushes was a predator, not the wind.

In a digital message, that negativity bias runs unchecked. “OK.” “Fine.” “Sure.” “Let me know.” Every one of these can be read as warm, neutral, or ice-cold depending on the reader’s mood, their history with you, and what story they’re telling themselves about your intentions.

This is one of the core principles I teach in my conflict work and in the Best Conflict Conversation Cards: in the absence of knowing, our brains are hard-wired to make up a story. And that story is almost never generous. When you add a low-information medium like email or text on top of that wiring, you’re setting the stage for conflict that was never necessary.

The Sillars and Zorn research confirms this at the organizational level. Their “negative intensification bias” shows that when a workplace culture is already strained, people read emails through the darkest possible lens. The words don’t even have to be negative. The reader’s context makes them negative. And once that interpretation takes hold, it’s very hard to undo, because unlike a face-to-face conversation, there’s no real-time feedback loop to correct it.

The Real Cost

This isn’t just about hurt feelings. Miscommunication at work is expensive. According to Grammarly's State of Business Communication report, miscommunication costs U.S. businesses an estimated $1.2 trillion annually.

Meanwhile, 51% of workers say poor communication increases their stress levels, and 22% have considered finding a new job because of it. When your best people leave because of unresolved conflict that started with a misread email, the cost isn’t just financial. It’s cultural. And it compounds.

So, What Do You Do?

The research points to a simple rule I use in my own practice and teach to every client: match the medium to the message. And when in doubt, hold it and reread it after 24h.

If it’s information with no emotional weight, email or text is fine. Meeting times, document links, logistics. Routine exchanges between people who know each other well. No problem.  Throw in a good wish at the end though.  It never hurts.

If it involves feedback, disagreement, disappointment, frustration, or anything where tone matters, pick up the phone. Better yet, have the conversation face-to-face. You’ll save yourself hours of back-and-forth, layers of misunderstanding, and the slow erosion of trust that happens when people read your words through their own negativity bias.

Pay special attention when the relationship is new, the power dynamic is uneven, or the culture is already strained. Those are the conditions where every study, from Kruger and Epley to Sillars and Zorn, shows that misinterpretation is most likely.

And if you’re a brief communicator, add one warm sentence before you hit send. “Thanks for pulling this together” before “Change the numbers on page 3.” “I appreciate you flagging this” before “Let’s discuss.” The warmth costs you five seconds. The coldness costs you the relationship.

Here’s my shorthand: if it’s important enough to be upset about, it’s important enough for a real conversation. Tone doesn’t travel in 12-point font.

And before you send that next email, try reading it out loud in the most uncharitable tone you can imagine. If it could be misread, it will be. That’s not pessimism. That’s the research.

This Isn’t Just a Workplace Problem

Every finding in this piece applies to your family, your friendships, your marriage, your aging parents. The text you sent your teenager that started a fight. The email to your sibling about Mom’s care that went sideways. The group chat where someone’s silence felt like a statement. The same biology is at work. The same negativity bias. The same gap between confidence and accuracy, between what you meant and what they heard. Wherever the stakes are high and the relationship matters, the medium matters too.

The Right Way Is Rarely the Easy Way

I was reflecting on this article as I was closing – recognizing the convenience of speed and the ability to send a message any time via email and text vs the unintended consequences that comes with that.  I heard in my head, my parents say, “The right way is rarely the easy way.” Text and email feel efficient in the moment, but they can put a lot of work on the back end: cleaning up misunderstandings, repairing trust, undoing damage that didn’t need to happen, carrying a story about the other person that isn’t true…

Matching the medium to the message takes a few extra minutes on the front end. But those minutes do more than prevent miscommunication. When you show up in person, or even pick up the phone, you get something back that no email can give you: the experience of genuine connection. The research confirms what most of us already feel. Being in the room with someone, hearing their voice, seeing their face, it changes us. It changes the conversation. And it changes what’s possible.

Sometimes the extra effort isn’t just the right way. It’s the better way.

Back from the Rabbit Hole

So, what started as prep for a Myth or Fact game turned into a pretty significant reminder for me, too. I’m a conflict manager and a mediator. I help people communicate for a living. And I still catch myself firing off a two-word reply and assuming my intent is obvious.

It’s not. Twenty years of research is clear on that.

Nobody taught us this. Not in school, not in training, not in the employee handbook. We were given the tools to send messages instantly to anyone in the world, but nobody taught us the limitations of those tools. There aren’t “difficult people” in these situations. There are skills gaps. And understanding how communication channels affect understanding is one of the most important skills you can build.

The most important conversations are often the ones we’re not having, or the ones we’re having in the wrong medium. Choose the channel that serves the conversation, not the one that’s most convenient.

Your relationships, your team, and your peace of mind will thank you.

Sources and References

Kruger, J., Epley, N., Parker, J., & Ng, Z. (2005). “Egocentrism Over E-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 89, No. 6, 925–936.

Byron, K. (2008). “Carrying Too Heavy a Load? The Communication and Miscommunication of Emotion by Email.” Academy of Management Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, 309–327.

Yuan, Z., Park, Y., & Sliter, M. (2020). “Put You Down versus Tune You Out: Further Understanding Active and Passive Email Incivility.” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Vol. 25, No. 5, 330–344.

Sillars, A., & Zorn, T. (2021). “Hypernegative Interpretation of Negatively Perceived Email at Work.” Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3.

Pollmann, M., & Roos, C. (2025). “‘I Get U.’ People Correctly Interpret the Tone of Text Messages and Emails.” Computers in Human Behavior Reports, Vol. 18.

Poirier, R., Cook, A., & Klin, C. (2025). “Read. This. Slowly: Mimicking Spoken Pauses in Text Messages.” Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 16.

Morgan, N. (2018). Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World. Harvard Business Review Press.

Preply. (2023). “Navigating Communication in the Workplace.” Survey of 1,030 U.S. employees.

Mehrabian, A. (1971). Silent Messages. Based on two 1967 studies in the Journal of Consulting Psychology and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Grammarly. (2024). The State of Business Communication Report.

Myin-Germeys, I., et al. (2023). “Face-to-Face More Important Than Digital Communication for Mental Health During the Pandemic.” PMC/PubMed Central. N=411, k=9,791 daily questionnaires.

About Kimberly Best

Kimberly Best, RN, MA, is the founder of Best Conflict Solutions, LLC, a court-listed mediator in Missouri and Tennessee, and a FINRA Arbitrator. Drawing on decades as a critical care nurse and a master’s degree in Conflict Management from Lipscomb University, she helps families, healthcare organizations, and businesses navigate the conversations they’re avoiding so they can find their best way forward. Kim is the creator of the Best Conflict Conversation Cards: Workplace Edition and author of How to Live Forever: A Guide to Writing the Final Chapter of Your Life Story.

Learn more at bestconflictsolutions.com