Are business users social? A design experiment exploring information sharing in enterprise social systems

Abstract

In recent years, social technology has changed the ways people collaborate and communicate. With the blurring boundaries between work and personal life, business software vendors have begun to deliberate on the possibilities for enhancing the rather rigid and impersonal structures in enterprise systems (ES) by integrating social features. In doing so, they frequently assume that business users share the same interaction patterns as private users. In this paper, we challenge this belief and explore the factors that stimulate business users to share information in ES environments. By means of a design experiment, we show different use scenarios and explore business users' attitudes toward open and unconditional information sharing in ES. Our results demonstrate that business users are less 'social' and that applying social features in ES is highly context dependent. Based on these findings, we offer recommendations for software vendors and researchers who are interested in the social enhancements of ES.

Advances in Social Media Research: Past, Present and Future

“…Another study concerning social features in enterprise systems reveals that business interactions are less social, and highly context specific (Mettler and Winter 2016). Van Osch and Steinfield (2016) showed that the enterprise system user involved in social network posting will show differences in team boundary spanning activities based on their hierarchical position (leadership, team member, etc.).…”

“…In a similar vein, other studies Tow et al 2010) have acknowledged the limitation of restricting their research to a single social media site, and recommend future researchers to adopt a cross-platform perspective for drawing significant inferences. Mettler and Winter (2016) suggest that there is a paucity of studies on Enterprise Social Systems because of its novelty, and urge researchers to fill this void. identify the lack of conceptualization in the notion of technology addiction; they recognize that the process of defining it is still in the early stages, and is being debated across communities.…”

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

“…A revision or even surveillance strongly influences the privacy of an ESN user. Here recent studies revealed that privacy concerns have a negative impact on the intention to use and sharing behaviors of ESN users [10,52]. Further, the reduced freedom for users to generate content is contradicting with e.g.…”

“…the feeling of 'anxiety' can further escalate when the question of distribution was prior placed with the employees' supervisor, or the latter needs to intervene if a discussion takes a wrong way due to missing cues [58]. Another UGC distribution barrier can originate from professional users more self-oriented and calculated profile in their contributing and sharing behavior [52]. Moreover, the self-orientation might make it difficult to build the proclaimed common basis which eventually leads to the stewardship phenomenon.…”

“…Here the effect on employee performance of ESN use [1,28,41] and factors influencing employees motivation to engage or reject such platforms [10,12,13,42,52,62,69] are growing fields. Since, these new collaborations tools are impacting the organizational relation und information association, they also interfere with hierarchy and power structures [6,67].…”