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Teaming at the Limit: Enhancing Team Effectiveness with Enterprise Social Media Affordances
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Author: Jacqueline Lane, Northwestern U.
Author: Paul Leonardi, UC Santa Barbara
Author: Noshir Contractor, Northwestern U.
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OCIS Best Student Paper Award Finalist
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Work teams in organizations face numerous challenges, including increasing task complexity, changing economic, strategic and environmental conditions, greater remoteness, stiffer global competition, and flatter organizational structures. These challenges emphasize the need for effective collaboration to enable teams to attain their goals and objectives. Social media are increasingly being implemented in work organizations as tools facilitating communication and collaboration among employees. The unprecedented opportunities for collaboration afford new behaviors that are enabling individuals to team up in new ways that were difficult to achieve before these technologies were available. Although recent research has examined how enterprise social media use can enhance the abilities of organizational workers to accomplish their work tasks, research on the use of social media at the team and inter-team level remains largely unexplored (Leonardi and Vaast, in press). In this article, we develop a conceptual model that explains how social media technologies afford new potential for action that can help teams overcome their perennial challenges. We integrate previous literature on team effectiveness and identify nine enabling conditions that teams need to improve their effectiveness. Then, we determine how the use of social media technologies can potentially enhance each of these enabling conditions. We theorize several ways that social media afford new capabilities for teaming, and suggest that these new technologies can push teaming to new limits. We conclude with implications for future research.
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Search Terms: team effectiveness | social media | affordances
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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When Online Ties are not Enough in Enterprise Social Media Networks
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Author: Nabila Boukef, U. côte d'Azur, Skema, France
Author: Mohamed Hédi Charki, EDHEC Business School
Author: Jerry Kane, Boston College
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Extensive research in the Information Systems field has already advanced our understanding of the advantages, the effects and the challenges associated with online ties in online social networks at the workplace. However, we still know little about the situation when additional forms of ties – offline ties – overlap with online ties in online networks enabled by the use of enterprise social media. Relying on the methods behind social network analysis and using the theories of social networks, we develop a measure of congruence between two networks of offline and online ties in order to examine the impact of their congruence on employee outcomes that we label network congruence. We argue that understanding the network congruence effect on employee outcomes is critical because employees’ online ties do not operate in vacuum and because of their consequences on the long term success of enterprise social media. To test our hypotheses, we used field data from 1731 employees of a large international cosmetic company spread over 29 countries in four continents. We found that network congruence is significantly and positively associated with employee outcomes out of the use of enterprise social media. Our results revealed also that users who have a higher outdegree centrality, higher private social media experience and distant from the headquarter enjoy better outcomes associated with the use of enterprise social media. Our work provides three main theoretical contributions. First, we demonstrate that offline ties complement online ties as their structural congruent effect leads to greater benefits than those derived from online ties alone. Second, our work contributes to the current debate on the micro-foundations of organizational social networks by showing that online social networks are not only shaped by actors’ structural positions but that combined actors’ individual characteristics and attributes affect employee outcomes from online social networks.
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Search Terms: Enterprise social media | Network congruence | Employee outcomes
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Coordinating Social Media Management Interfaces Across the Organization
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Author: Constance Elizabeth Kampf, Aarhus U., Department of Management
Author: Lars Haahr, Aarhus BSS, Aarhus U.
Author: Marjan Mohammadreza, Aarhus BSS, Aarhus U.
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To establish a holistic framework for approaching social media management that offers a way to approach new, amplified and emerging interfaces affecting organizations. We apply Porter's historic value chain model as a scaffold to approach a holistic understanding of social media management and organize highly cited concepts related to social media management from the fields of IT and Corporate Communication. We find that classifying current studies in relation to secondary and primary activities from an historic value chain scaffold enables researchers to define and classify interfaces that can inform our understanding of social media management in a holistic manner. From an activity perspective, both primary and secondary activities related to social media can be argued to have interfaces with social media platforms, participants and audiences. In addition, interfaces enabled by social media technology affordances can be classified as new, amplified or emergent. Using a historic approach to organizational activities for organizing social media research enables researchers and social media managers to work with social media management strategies at a more detailed and nuanced level, taking types of activities as well as types of activities into account. This paper offers a cross disciplinary perspective connecting research from Corporate Communication and IT fields--both fields that attend to organizations in holistic manners, yet focus on different types of activities due to their disciplinary frames of reference. This combined perspective enables a dynamic framework for developing holistic approaches to social media management.
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Search Terms: Social Media Management | Corporate Communication | IT
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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