Essays on enterprise social media: moderation, shop floor integration and information system induced organizational change

The digital transformation increases the pressure on innovation capabilities and challenges organizations to adapt their business models. In order to cope with the increased competitiveness, organizations face two significant internal challenges: Enabling internal digital collaboration and knowledge sharing as well as information system-induced change. This dissertation will investigate seven related research questions divided in two main parts. The first part focuses on how an organization can foster digital knowledge exchanges and collaboration in global organizations. Enterprise social media has attracted the attention of organizations as a technology for social collaboration and knowledge sharing. The dissertation will investigate how organizations can moderate the employee discourse in such platforms from a novel organizational perspective and provide insights on how to increase the encouragement for employees to contribute and assure content quality. The developed framework will provide detailed moderation approaches. In addition, the risk of privacy concerns associated with organizational interference in the new digital collaboration technologies are evaluated. The second part of the dissertation shifts the focus to the shop floor environment, an area that has faced substantial digital advancements. Those advancements change the organizational role of the shop floor to a more knowledge work-oriented environment. Firstly, a state of research regarding technology acceptance and professional diversity is presented to create an enterprise social media job-characteristic framework. Further, a unique and longitudinal shop floor case study is investigated to derive organizational challenges for enterprise social media and potentials for empowerment. To validate the future shop floor environment needs use cases for the shop floor are derived and a user profile is established. The case study is extended by expert interviews to focus on conceptualizing organizational information systems-induced change. In this regard, the role of work practices, organizational and employee mindset and information system change are integrated into a holistic organizational change model that targets employee empowerment. This dissertation provides a comprehensive overview of enterprise social media from an organizational management and shop floor perspective. It contributes to understanding new digital needs at the shop floor and the information systems-induced change journey towards digital employee empowerment

Organizational Challenges for Enterprise Social Media at the Shop Floor

Shop floor workers are at the center of the digital transformation of manufactures. Information systems and knowledge-work are becoming part of a former digitally disconnected workforce group. The change from routine task execution to knowledge provision is a challenging task for organizations and its shop floor workforce. To manage the complex transition information and communication technologies (ICT) like enterprise social media (ESM) can be the first step to empower the shop floor for its new organizational role. We present a case study in which we evaluate an ESM integration from the workers’ perspective and develop shop floor ESM use cases. Based on the workers’ perspective we derive and discuss organizational challenges that come with an ICT-enabled empowerment process. We contribute to ESM research by adding a new ESM user perspective and addressing ESMs’ applicability at the shop floor