Social Media Dynamics in Organizational Contexts

Social media platforms have transformed organisational communication, enabling rapid knowledge exchange, boundary spanning and enhanced visibility of work processes. Within enterprise settings, social media tools facilitate informal networks, flatten hierarchies and support collaborative problem-solving. Key dynamics include technological affordances—such as visibility, persistence and association—that shape how employees share information and build social capital. These platforms can boost employee agility, creativity and engagement by lowering barriers to knowledge transfer and strengthening identification with organisational goals. At the same time, they introduce challenges around information overload, governance and privacy management, as well as potential negative behaviours such as supervisory distraction. The research landscape spans investigations of individual-level self-efficacy, group boundary-spanning activities, policy frameworks for governance, cross-cultural variations in use and the balance between benefits and risks. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for practitioners seeking to harness social media for performance improvement, innovation and employee well-being while mitigating unintended consequences.

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Social Media Dynamics in Organizational Contexts publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in social media dynamics in organizational contexts across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Enterprise social media (ESM): Internal digital platforms used by organisations to support collaboration, information sharing and informal communication among employees.

Affordance: Action possibilities offered by a technology, such as the capacity for message visibility, persistence and network association that influence user behaviour.

Phubbing: A portmanteau of “phone” and “snubbing”, referring to the act of ignoring someone in favour of a mobile device, which in organisational settings can undermine managerial presence and employee motivation.

References

1. Investigating visibility affordance, knowledge transfer and employee agility performance. A study of enterprise social media. Technovation (2023).
2. Social media affordances and governance in the workplace: an examination of organizational policies. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (2013).
3. The dark side of phubbing in the workplace: Investigating the role of intrinsic motivation and the use of enterprise social media (ESM) in a cross-cultural setting. Journal of Business Research (2022).
4. Work-related social media use: The mediating role of social media communication self-efficacy. European Management Journal (2022).
5. Team Boundary Spanning: Strategic Implications for the Implementation and use of Enterprise Social Media. Journal of Information Technology (2016).