This project will explore the potential of enterprise social media (ESM) for enhancing inter-group cross-boundary communications and performance of collaborative organizational groups. Enhancing the performance of organizational groups is critical to industrial success and the economic competitiveness of organizations in the United States. The study will provide implications for the strategic design and organizational implementation of ESM tools to enhance their impact on collaboration and innovation and offer specific guidelines for the design of ESM platforms aimed at evoking and enhancing collaboration and boundary spanning in other cyber-human systems. The project will also produce relevant materials for the education and training of students.
This project is motivated by two recent scientific developments. On the one hand, there is growing recognition of the need to study social media in groups and to explore its potential for supporting a range of group and organizational outcomes. On the other hand, the recent literature on boundary-spanning has proposed the need for shifting the focus to virtual contexts and in particular assessing how the use of virtual tools (e.g. ESM) affects boundary-spanning success. This study responds to both developments with a longitudinal, multi-level, and mixed-method empirical study of the relations between ESM use and intra-organizational boundary spanning. The research will address four related research questions: 1) the types of boundary-spanning activities that occur using ESM; 2) the effect of these activities on group performance; 3) the impact of a group's degree of virtuality; and 4) the effect of the affordances and privacy settings embedded in the ESM platform on boundary spanning and group effectiveness. The proposed approach entails a dynamic multimodal network analysis complemented with mixed-method data for providing a processual understanding of the effect of ESM on intra-organizational boundary spanning and group performance. The study will provide several contributions to the ESM and boundary spanning literature. First, it will contribute to the development of a conceptual and operational apparatus for understanding how ESM supports boundary spanning. Second, the project will contribute an understanding of ESM use at the inter-group and intra-organizational level, thereby extending the current individual-level focus that has dominated much of the social media literature. Third, the project will contribute an understanding of the (a) effectiveness of virtual tools in supporting boundary-spanning activities, (b) the optimal configurations of network relations for supporting these activities, and (c) the effect of other node variables and tie characteristics on the relation between ESM use, boundary spanning, and the performance of collaborative groups.
