A Structural Model of Employee Behavioral Dynamics in Enterprise Social Media

We develop and estimate a dynamic structural framework to analyze the social-media content creation and consumption behavior of employees within an enterprise. We focus, in particular, on employees’ blogging behavior. The model incorporates two key features that are ubiquitous in blogging forums: users face (1) a trade-off between blog posting and blog reading; and (2) a trade-off between work-related and leisure-related content. We apply the model to a unique data set comprising the complete details of the blog posting and reading behavior of employees over a 15-month period at a Fortune 1000 IT services and consulting firm. Despite getting a higher utility from work-related blogging, employees nevertheless publish a significant number of leisure posts. This is partially because the creation of leisure posts has a significant positive spillover effect on the readership of work posts. Counterfactual experiments demonstrate that leisure-related blogging has positive spillovers for work-related blogging, and hence a policy of abolishing leisure-related content creation can inadvertently have adverse consequences on work-related content creation in an enterprise setting. When organizations restrict leisure blogging, the sharing of online work-related knowledge decreases and this in turn can also reduce employee performance rating. Overall, blogging within enterprises by employees during their work day can have positive long-term benefits for organizations

Driving the Use of Enterprise Social Media at Work: A Framework for Employees’ Adoption

More and more organizations are using enterprise social media (ESM) to improve the efficiency of communication and collaboration. Although many studies have tried to investigate employees’ adoption of this technology, most only provide limited insights and fail to capture the differences between ESM and other information systems used in organizations. In this article, we introduce a framework for enterprise social media adoption at the individual level. Our framework is based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and enterprise social media affordances. It is necessary to divide employees’ usage behavior into three types: not use, contribute, and lurk. We propose that the affordances initiate new types of factors that drive the three types of employees’ usage behavior differently

Social Media in the Workplace: Influence on Employee Agility and Innovative Behavior

Despite the increasing adoption of enterprise social media (ESM), little research has examined the link between ESM use and job outcomes. We examine this link, highlighting the role of agility at an individual level. We adopt two measures of use – deep structure use (view, create, and respond) and cognitive absorption use. We develop and operationalize work agility and communication agility as primary benefits of ESM use, which are hypothesized to affect employees\u27 innovative behavior outcomes. Using two waves of surveys from a Fortune 500 company, we found that create and respond were significant for work agility, while create and view were significant for communication agility. Cognitive absorption use influences both work and communication agility. Counter-intuitively, we found a negative effect of communication agility on innovative behavior, while work agility was positive as expected. This research sheds light on the underlying influence mechanism of ESM use from the dual perspective of system use

Identifying Value-adding Users in Enterprise Social Networks

Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) have been gaining increasing attention both in academia and practice. In previous works, different user types were identified in ESN. However, there is no clear definition of value-adding users, their characteristics and how this type of user can be identified. Based on a literature review, we show that value-adding users are defined in different ways in respect to different objectives, for example spreading knowledge, vivacity of the network or real-time feedback. Each of the value-adding users shows different characteristics that are allocated to the following dimensions: network structure, message, behavior, and social network affinity. Based on the objectives and characteristics, we conduct a single case study, analyze a dataset of a cooperating company, conduct several interviews, and thereby identify value-adding users with respect to objectives. So, we can show that our approach is applicable, useful and that it is a valuable means to take decisions

Crowdsourcing Contests: A Dynamic Structural Model of the Impact of Incentive Structure on Solution Quality

A key challenge faced by firms that undertake crowdsourcing-contests to get solutions from crowds to their problems is to design an incentive structure which helps attract high quality solutions. We develop a structural model of user participation in crowdsourcing-contests and present empirical evidence on how incentive structure could affect the quality of solutions. Using data from Threadless.com, we find that participants exert less effort as competition for the reward increases. This may indicate that increasing the reward may adversely affect the quality of the solutions produced as it will increase the competition. However, counter-intuitively the policy simulations indicate that increasing the reward increases both quantity and quality of the solutions. This is because under the new policy of higher reward, individual equilibrium behavior is different. When the firm increases the reward, the additional utility from increase in the reward offsets the reduction in probability of winning due to intensified competition

Hybrid social media:Employees' use of a boundary-spanning technology

Improved employee collaboration and communication can be facilitated by social technologies that extend within and beyond organizations. These social technologies have increasingly come to be represented by social media sites, which are used to extend workplace relationships across personal and professional boundaries in a hybrid role. This presents opportunities and risks as those boundaries are collapsed. Using boundary management as a theoretical lens, we evaluate the associations of relationship initiation between colleagues at different levels of organisations with employees’ strategies and their well-being. We also investigate relationships with social media usage, age and propensity to self-monitor and group employees using cluster analysis. We consider implications of our findings for developing more sophisticated policies, training, and guidance for employees on the use of social media as a workplace tool

Hybrid social media:Employees' use of a boundary-spanning technology

Improved employee collaboration and communication can be facilitated by social technologies that extend within and beyond organizations. These social technologies have increasingly come to be represented by social media sites, which are used to extend workplace relationships across personal and professional boundaries in a hybrid role. This presents opportunities and risks as those boundaries are collapsed. Using boundary management as a theoretical lens, we evaluate the associations of relationship initiation between colleagues at different levels of organisations with employees’ strategies and their well-being. We also investigate relationships with social media usage, age and propensity to self-monitor and group employees using cluster analysis. We consider implications of our findings for developing more sophisticated policies, training, and guidance for employees on the use of social media as a workplace tool

Realizing the Activation Potential of Online Communities

Online communities suffer from the 1-9-90 principle, which states that 1% of the community\u27s user base generates original content, an additional 9% is limited to interacting with existing content, while the remaining 90% of the participants is passively lurking. In this work we present a data-driven stochastic framework that estimates (1) the activation potential (i.e., the users that are currently lurkers but present a high likelihood of becoming heavy contributors) of an online community and (2) when and which users are more likely to become heavy contributors. Our proposed framework captures the transitional evolution of a user by a Hidden Markov Model, and estimates each user\u27s propensity to become a heavy contributor by employing parametric survival models. We build and evaluate our models on a unique large dataset of a specialized online community about diabetes

Enterprise social media adoption:Its impact on social capital in work and job satisfaction

Enterprise social media is increasingly being recognized as an important technical tool to achieve more effective management and sustainable development. Limited research has been conducted on workplace satisfaction in the enterprise social media context. To fill this gap, we propose a research model explaininghowemployees' usage of enterprise social media influences job satisfaction from the social capital perspective. Through a survey of 509 respondents, we conceptualize the constructs of enterprise social media use (i.e., work-related use and social-related use), social capital (i.e., bridging social capital and bonding social capital), and job satisfaction. We empirically validate the proposed model. The results largely support the proposed hypotheses. Firstly, both work-related use and social-related use positively impact bridging and bonding social capital. Secondly, bridging and bonding social capital play different roles in job satisfaction. Bonding social capital promotes job satisfaction, while bridging social capital inhibits job satisfaction. Thirdly, work-related use accumulates more bridging social capital, while social-related use is more conducive to the establishment of bonding social capital. Finally, some theoretical and practical implications are discussed.</p

Internal market orientation as a value creation mechanism

Purpose This conceptual paper aspires to re-examine the nature, aim and scope of Internal Market Orientation (IMO) and introduce it as a value creation mechanism for the firm’s internal market. A service-dominant logic (SDL)-based perspective of the IMO notion is advanced and the key steps and phases for value creation in the internal market are outlined. Design/methodology/approach This conceptual paper bridges the IM discourse with the service-dominant logic literature and the latter’s implications for internal marketing theory and practice are discussed. Findings Drawing on the premises of the service-dominant logic, IMO re-surfaces as an interconnected operant resource that can be enacted through performing three sets of activities central in the value creation process for internal stakeholders (i.e. value-identifying, value-generating and value-enhancing activities). These groups of relevant value-enabling activities required for IMO enactment are extensively discussed and their role in the value creation process is scrutinized. Originality/value This conceptual paper aspires to provide a managerially relevant understanding of value creation in the firm’s internal market. A SDL-driven understanding of IMO is advanced setting it as a value creation mechanism appealing to a wider range of organizations