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

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

Future of Flexible Work in the Digital Age: Bring Your Own Device Challenges of Privacy Protection

The future of work is getting increasingly flexible due to the rising expectations of employees away from traditional 9-to-5 office work towards flexible work hours, which drives employees to use their mobile devices for work. This ever-growing phenomenon of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) creates security risks for companies, which leads to an implementation of mobile device management (MDM) solutions to secure and monitor employees’ mobile devices. We present insights from two multinational case companies, where works councils have expressed their concerns for privacy intrusion into employees’ lives through BYOD. To examine whether employees share works councils’ concerns, we conducted a survey with 542 employees from three countries: United States, Germany, and South Korea. Results of a structural equation modeling show that American employees place greater emphasis on BYOD risks associated with privacy concerns compared to employees from Germany and South Korea

New insight into kinetics behavor of the structural formation process in Agar gelation

A time-resolved experimental study on the kinetics and relaxation of the structural formation process in gelling Agar-water solutions was carried out using our custom-built torsion resonator. The study was based on measurements of three naturally cooled solutions with agar concentrations of 0.75%, 1.0% and 2.0% w/w. It was found that the natural-cooling agar gelation process could be divided into three stages, sol stage (Stage I), gelation zone (Stage II) and gel stage (Stage III), based on the time/temperature evolutions of the structural development rate (SDR). An interesting fluctuant decaying behavior of SDR was observed in Stage II and III, indicative of a sum of multiple relaxation processes and well described by a multiple-order Gaussisn-like equation: . More interestingly, the temperature dependences of the fitted values of Wn in Stage II and Stage III were found to follow the different Arrhenius laws, with different activation energies of EaII= 39-74 KJ/mol and EaIII~7.0 KJ/mol. The two different Arrhenius-like behaviors respectively suggest that dispersions in Stage II be attributed to the relaxation of the self-assembly of agar molecules or the growth of junction zones en route to gelation, in which the formation or fission of hydrogen bonding interactions plays an important role; and that dispersions in Stage III be attributed to the relaxation dynamics of water released from various size domains close to the domain of the viscous flow of water during the syneresis process.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

Compact Polyelectrolyte Complexes: “Saloplastic” Candidates for Biomaterials

Precipitates of polyelectrolyte complexes were transformed into rugged shapes suitable for bioimplants by ultracentrifugation in the presence of high salt concentration. Salt ions dope the complex, creating a softer material with viscous fluid-like properties. Complexes that were compacted under the centrifugal field (CoPECs) were made from poly(diallyldimethyl ammonium), PDADMA, as polycation, and poly(styrene sulfonate), PSS, or poly(methacrylic acid), PMAA, as polyanion. Dynamic mechanical testing revealed a rubbery plateau at lower frequencies for PSS/PDADMA with moduli that decreased with increasing salt concentration, as internal ion pair cross-links were broken. CoPECs had significantly lower modulii compared to similar polyelectrolyte complexes prepared by the “multilayering ” method. The difference in mechanical properties was ascribed to higher water content (located in micropores) for the former and, more importantly, to their nonstoichiometric polymer composition. The modulus of PMAA/PDADMA CoPECs, under physiological conditions, demonstrated dynamic mechanical properties that were close to those of the nucleus pulposus in an intervertebral disk

The Journey towards Digital Work Empowerment - Conceptualizing IS-Induced Change on the Shop Floor

Information systems (IS), introduced as part of the digital transformation efforts of many manufacturing companies, redefine the role of a prior digitally disconnected workforce group: Shop floor workers (SFWs). Their evolution - from routine workers to empowered operational knowledge workers and process facilitators - challenges both the individual and the organization on various levels. Based on insights from an in-depth case study, we explore the digital transformation journey of a large-scale manufacturing company between 2016 and 2019. Analyzing data from interviews with 24 SFWs and applying the theoretical lens of technological frames allows us to highlight complex interrelations between IS-induced change, the mindset change and the work practices change. We revisit our analysis of the technological frame perceptions via a reflection with organizational executive experts and develop a more holistic understanding of IS-induced change

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