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Hybrid social media: employees’ use of a boundary‐spanning technology
Author(s) -
ArcherBrown Chris,
Marder Ben,
Calvard Thomas,
Kowalski Tina
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
new technology, work and employment
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.889
H-Index - 45
eISSN - 1468-005X
pISSN - 0268-1072
DOI - 10.1111/ntwe.12103
Subject(s) - social media , boundary spanning , boundary (topology) , business , public relations , knowledge management , marketing , computer science , political science , world wide web , mathematical analysis , mathematics
Improved employee collaboration and communication can be facilitated by social technologies that extend within and beyond organisations. These social technologies have increasingly come to be represented by social media sites, which are used to extend workplace relationships across personal and professional boundaries in a hybrid role. This presents opportunities and risks as those boundaries are collapsed. Using boundary management as a theoretical lens, we evaluate the associations of relationship initiation between colleagues at different levels of organisations with employees’ strategies and their well‐being. We also investigate relationships with social media usage, age and propensity to self‐monitor and group employees using cluster analysis. We consider implications of our findings for developing more sophisticated policies, training and guidance for employees on the use of social media as a workplace tool.