HOW DOES ENTERPRISE SOCIAL MEDIA (ESM) INFLUENCE NEWCOMERS’ SOCIALIZATION: A MULTILEVEL PERSPECTIVE

Socialization plays an essential role in ensuring that newcomers to an organization enjoy greater productivity and also integrate well into their workgroups. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprise social media (ESM) is increasingly being used in organizations as an informal socialization tool. However, the effectiveness of these tools in affording the necessary socialization opportunities and enabling the newcomers to better integrate within their organizational settings remains both unclear and understudied. Drawing on the extant literature on newcomer socialization within organizational behavior and the IT affordances research, this study proposes a multilevel research model to explain how various ESM affordances affect newcomers’ socialization effectiveness (i.e., performance proficiency at the individual level and group cohesion at the group level). Plans for verifying the model using two quantitative sub-studies based on the multi-source and multi-wave research design are also presented. Research implications and future research plans are also discussed

Enterprise Social Network Applications: Enhancing and Driving Innovation Culture and Productivity Through Digital Technologies

Enterprise Social Network (ESN) applications offer new opportunities for organizations to mobilize employees, promoting innovation beyond traditional R&D functions. Despite the popularity and success of these applications, current research has yet to fully explore the potential of ESN applications as both drivers of productive innovation and innovation culture, specifically. This paper proposes a theoretical framework that explains the role of ESN applications in facilitating organizational-wide ideation, collaboration, and socialization, thereby promoting innovation culture and innovation productivity. This study reveals that the dimensions of innovation culture, namely knowledge sharing, transparency, and risk tolerance, mediate the effects of ESN applications on the measures of firm innovation productivity— product/service innovation, process innovation, and social innovation. The findings presented here have implications for theory and practice, namely concerning building an organizational culture that promotes open innovative behavior using social technologies

Social Bots as Initiators of Human Interaction in Enterprise Social Networks

Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) are said to have the potential to significantly improve communication and collaboration between employees. However, utilization is still a problem in organizations, as participation is voluntary. Current research on Affordance theory in IS research suggests one reason being that users may not always recognize the opportunities for action and the potential outcome of the corresponding actualization. In our qualitative study in a medium-sized company, we investigate how experiencing offline networking with other ESN users will help to recognize online networking potentials, leading to an increased actualization of ESN affordances. In addition, we investigate the role of social bots (here: Lunch Roulette Bot), which provoke interaction by inviting users to meet other employees for lunch, therefore nudging users to experience certain actualizations like offline networking. We find that social bots can be more helpful than conventional one-to-many solicitations of the management and increase human interaction in ESN

Enterprise Social Networks and Innovation Productivity: The Role of Innovation Culture

Enterprise Social Network (ESN) applications offer new opportunities for organizations to innovate. This paper proposes a new theoretical framework that explains how ESN applications facilitate ideation, socialization, and collaboration which in turn fosters the innovation culture of knowledge sharing, transparency, and risk tolerance. This study suggests that organizations maintaining this innovative culture will be able to find higher success in driving product, process, and social innovation, especially when management support is present. A key proposition is how dimensions of innovation culture, namely knowledge sharing, transparency, and risk tolerance mediate the effects of ESN applications on measures of firm performance namely product or service, process, and social innovation. The findings have implications for theory and practice, especially concerning building an organizational culture using social technologies such as ESN that foster innovative behavior

Advancing Digital Collaboration: Barriers to Enterprise Social Media Adoption and how to Overcome them

Advancing digital collaboration and fostering effective communication among a widespread workforce continues to be a perpetual challenge for companies. Organizations are progressively turning to Enterprise Social Media (ESM) because they promise new avenues for collaborative working. However, most ESMs fail to reach a wider adoption by the workforce, owing to an underutilization by the employees. To enhance the understanding of the underutilization phenomenon, we use affordance actualization theory as our theoretical lens to critically study the challenges employees face in their attempt to actualize respective ESM affordances. By analyzing comments from 992 frequent, infrequent, and discontinued ESM users from a large multinational company, we uncover four major challenges. By enhancing our understanding of ESM affordances and by incorporating the full spectrum from problem identification to solution, we provide practical advice for digital leaders and meaningful theoretical implications for the IS community

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

What and how do companies benefit from social media?:a review of seven company case studies

Abstract. Social Media (SM) has turned into our daily life in the information society. People are showing an increasing tendency to build and nurture their online social relationship on SM platforms. Organizational SM has become an important research area for both scholars and practitioners who are interested in online technologies. It is worth of studying what the researches have been done related to the SM usage in organizations, and how the organizations have utilized the SMs for own specific purpose. SM used in organization has grown continuously. Business enterprises quickly recognize the value of shared contents. They have been increasingly adopted in the workplace for decision-making, supporting corporate communication, knowledge management, facilitating communication both inside organization and the stakeholders outside organization, increasing the social capital, enhancing the brand value and promoting the marketing practice in organization, both in business to business and business to customers. Many corporations are using blogs, wikis, and social networking sites (SNS) as routine parts of their business operations. The performances of the usage of the SM can be generally classified as internal usage and external usage. All of them have the different purposes and tactics basing on various targeted users. For the thesis work, a literature review was conducted by studying the existing empirical research on the usage of SM in organizations from selected existing scientific articles. The current status of the organizational SM usage has been investigated. Two theories have been chosen which are both the affordances of SM (Visibility, Persistence, Editability, and Association) and the honeycomb functional building blocks of SM (Identity, Conversations, Sharing, Presence, Relationships, Reputation and Groups). Based on them, the case studies in seven companies have been explored, aiming to search some of the four affordances and certain amount of the seven functional blocks in organizational SM activities, and explain how they influences the organizational behaviours. Applying such two theories shows that the organizations may participant the SM platforms efficiently and effectively in various ways. Some good practises of the SM usage have been portrayed. The risks related of using SM platforms have been mentioned as well. The future potential research works related the organizational SM usage has been discussed

Towards a Differentiation Perspective on Social Media Platforms’ Affordances and Use Cultures – An Organizing Literature Review

Since social media transformed the way how people communicate and consume content, companies explore how to effectively build relationships with users. Anecdotal reports of practical case experiences indicate that a key managerial challenge for companies lies in effectively coping with the individual requirements and the full range of options of the various different social media platforms as well as adapting to the target groups’ platform-specific use cultures. Current theoretical conceptualizations of generalized social media ‘per se’ appear too broad for addressing and differentiating the detailed affordances and their appropriation by networked users in the leading platforms Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Based on a comprehensive organizing literature review that seeks to link the affordance and the use culture perspective in information systems research, we contribute to a better understanding of differences between social media platforms

Identity Change through Affordances Actualization: Evidence from Healthcare Workers

As more and more digital technologies are used in healthcare organizations, the way healthcare workers work and doctor-patient communication are changing. These changes will lead to identity change of healthcare workers. Some scholars try to understand technological changes in terms of the affordance theory. However, there are few relevant studies that incorporate specific application scenarios. In this paper, we explore the specific performance of the digital technology affordance and the impact on healthcare workers’ identity in China. We conducted in-depth interviews with 14 healthcare workers and used grounded theory to summarize three kinds of digital technology affordance, namely functional affordance, process affordance and performance affordance. The findings suggest that on the one hand, digital technology affordance increase the efficiency of healthcare workers and enhance collaboration among colleagues, thus reinforcing the healthcare workers’ identity. On the other hand, over-reliance on digital technology may also lead to unnecessary hassles that worsen healthcare workers’ identity. Our study enriches the affordance theory and identity theory, and has constructive implications for the quality of healthcare services in a digital context