Moderation of Enterprise Social Networks – A Literature Review from a Corporate Perspective

The implementation of internal social collaboration technologies confronts corporations with new challenges. Former unidirectional information flows become multidirectional and user-content driven networks. Prior research describes the successful implementation as a challenging management task with employees’ usage at the center of attention. Consequently, corporations need to select a moderation style to encourage the usage. The degree of corporate engagement might have repercussions on the contribution behavior. We conduct a structured literature review to identify pre-existing IS contributions to the moderation phenomenon in social media tools, which help to explain on how to moderate these communication platforms in the enterprise context. We reviewed over 150 articles on the subject and assessed 31 articles in depth on the degree of corporate engagement and user content encouragement. We analyze the identified literature for gaps in understanding the phenomenon and provide a first assessment of three different moderation approaches and give implication for future research

Crossing hierarchies in organizations: Making sense of employee dissent and circumvention on internal social media

This paper explores how and why visibility and persistence factors affect employee communication on internal social media (ISM) and influence organizational dissent. This study presents findings from a single case study conducted at a Danish bank. Discussions initiated by employees on ISM were studied for four months, and 24 employees were interviewed about their communication behavior and their perception of communication on ISM. The study found that employees would deliberately use the visibility of communication in the ISM arena to bring up issues that had been ignored by middle managers or support staff. Senior managers were perceived to watch the arena, influencing middle managers or other employees to respond. The efficacy of dissent therefore seemed to increase with the presence of ISM, especially when a post was perceived as well-formulated and an act of prosocial behavior. A new, unwritten rule, therefore, seemed to have emerged that dissent and even circumvention on ISM was acceptable when framed in a constructive manner and aired for the benefit of the organization

Digital Workplace Model for Research University Publication Collaboration

Digital Workplace is a virtual equivalent to the modern version of traditional workplace where an employee can work anywhere by using any devices, browsing files and sharing knowledge.  Meanwhile, MyRa is commonly known as Malaysia Research Assessment tool for measuring research performance indicator in public university.  The MyRA instrument is used to engage the research development and innovation activities which outcomes is categorized into six levels, with ‘six stars’ being the highest and one star the lowest.  In order to achieve MyRA objective, research university boosts the research publications from academicians.  However, from all submission, not all publication papers are achieved a high standard, which causes low rating stars. The absence of working digital repository for research publication is among challenge face by most academicians in searching for research paper collections as a reference.  Besides that, they unable to keep in touch with the author of a research paper on getting advice and feedback for their working documents.  Thus, this study aims to propose a digital workplace model focusing on research publication Digital Workplace.  Initial findings highlights, there five main dimensions associated with establishing this model which are communication, environment, strategy, collaboration and community

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

Social media as a driver for new rhetorical practices in organisations

Social media adoption within organisations enables wider employee participation in corporate communication and rhetoric. We study the impact of social media on rhetorical practices inside organisations, namely how social media reshapes senior management communication. We study the online communication environments of eight organisations and identify two contrasting approaches in dealing with social media adoption: the closed and open model. In the closed model, organisations maintain central control and their communication platforms remain mainly one-way. In the open model, organisations develop and foster two-way interaction. The study finds that in the "open model", governance and culture of the organisation changes in order to address the shift in control and tension between top-down and bottom-up communication. Our key contribution is in rethinking rhetorical practices in the context of modern open and fluid online communication environments in organisations - rhetorical diffusion - and characterising the changes in governance and culture that enable this transition - internal ambidexterity.1 © 2012 IEEE