What's in it for me and you? Exploring managerial perceptions of employees' work-related social media use
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-12-2020-0518 |
| Published date | 15 March 2022 |
| Date | 15 March 2022 |
| Pages | 46-62 |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law |
| Author | Kaisa Pekkala,Tommi Auvinen,Pasi Sajasalo,Chiara Valentini |
What’s in it for me and you?
Exploring managerial perceptions
of employees’work-related
social media use
Kaisa Pekkala, Tommi Auvinen, Pasi Sajasalo and Chiara Valentini
University of Jyv€
askyl€
a, Jyv€
askyl€
a, Finland
Abstract
Purpose –This study focuses on managers’perceptions of employees’communicative role in social media,
and explores the changes in the contractual nature of employmentrelations in mediatized workplaces in which
the boundaries of professional and private life are becoming more fluid.
Design/methodology/approach –A qualitative approach was employed to explore this relatively new
phenomenon. The data, comprising 24 interviews with managers responsible for corporate communication and
human resources in knowledge-intensive organizations, was thematically analysed.
Findings –The analysis shows that employees’work-related social media use creates new types of exchanges
and dependencies bet ween an organization a nd individual employe es, which relate to em ployees’
representation, knowledge and networks.
Originality/value –The study is among the first to examine the exchanges and dependencies in an
employment relationship that emerge from increased use of social media for professional purposes.
Keywords Social media, Psychological contract, Knowledge work, Employment relationship,
Employees’communication behaviour
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Few technologies have resulted in such widespread, rapid social and economic changes as
Internet-based communicatio n technology (Internet Societ y, 2017). In particular, the
emergence of social media has created a new type of context for communication and
interaction (McFarland and Ployhart, 2015), which has reshaped society at all levels,
including interactions and identity construction, work and the economy (van Dijck and Poell,
2013), and –as we argue in this article –employment relationships. Social media has become
ubiquitous in many workplaces (El Ouirdi et al., 2015;Opgenhaffen and Claeys, 2017), where
communication power –referring to the ability to influence –has shifted from the few to the
many (Castells, 2009), duly enhancing the communicative role of individual employees
(Opgenhaffen and Claeys, 2017;Pekkala, 2020) and creating new types of exchanges and
dependencies between employers and employees.
Taking on new communicative roles, employees now have the ability to both share and
exert greater control over knowledge and connections (Gibbs et al., 2013) and shape
organizational identities and reputations (Baym and Boyd, 2012). This has become
ER
44,7
46
© Kaisa Pekkala, Tommi Auvinen, Pasi Sajasalo and Chiara Valentini. Published by Emerald
Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0)
licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both
commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and
authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/
legalcode.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0142-5455.htm
Received 1 December 2020
Revised 16 June 2021
21 October 2021
1 February 2022
Accepted 3 February 2022
Employee Relations: The
International Journal
Vol. 44 No. 7, 2022
pp. 46-62
Emerald Publishing Limited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-12-2020-0518
particularly noticeable for knowledge-intensive organizations in which the knowledge
possessed by members and how they make their knowledge visible through communication
is the primary strategic resource (Alvesson, 2004;Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998). Hence,
organizations, particularly those employing knowledge workers, are increasingly perceived
as “communicative”and each employee as a potential communicator in today’s mediatized
environment (Kuhn, 2008).
Yet despite the increased importance of employees’communicative role on external social
media platforms (such as Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook), to our knowledge, relatively few
studies to date have pursued the important topic of how this development may transform the
employment relationship (see e.g. Andersson, 2019a,b;Hurrell et al., 2017;McDonald and
Thompson, 2016). As one of these few exceptions, Andersson (2019a,b) has studied
“communication responsibility”and “organizational ambassadorship”, but whereas he
addresses these issues from the perspective of employees, we address them from the
perspective of the employer –represented by informants responsible for managing
employees’work-related social media communication in their respective organizations.
Work-related social media communication refers here to communicative acts in which
employees produce, share, and follow work-related content through publicly available social
media platforms (van Zoonen et al., 2016).
By adopting the employer perspective, this study focuses on managers’perceptions of
employees’communicative roles in social media and aims to identify whether and how
these novel role perceptions affect the employment relationship. More specifically, the
objective of this study is to determine how managers perceive the exchange relationship
in which organizations aim to benefit from employees’social media use –conducted
through their personal social media accounts –and what kind of outcomes they expect
this relationship to produce for both parties involved. To understand the related
dependencies, we apply a psychological contract (PC) approach to discover how exchange
agreements are formed and how they take on a (psychologically) contractual quality
(Conway and Pekcan, 2019). To this end, we draw on organizational behaviour,
organizational communication, management and human resource management (HRM)
literature.
Literature review
Communicative knowledge work in the mediatized workplace
By allowing anyone to create, share, and exchange information with multiple communities,
social media has enabled new patterns of work-related communications and interactions that
seem to be pertinent and advantageous among knowledge workers in particular (Leonardi
and Vaast, 2017;Treem and Leonardi, 2012). When communicating on social media,
employees embody, promote and defend the organization, scout for new information and
insights, and build and maintain relationships with stakeholders (Madsen and Verhoeven,
2019). Through these communicative processes, employees can enhance the organization’s
overall reputation and differentiate their organization from their competitors.
The affordances provided by today’s social media platforms give workers the ability to
make their behaviours, knowledge, preferences and communication network connections
visible to others (Treem and Leonardi, 2012, p. 150) and to reach large audiences, including
potential customers and other interest groups (Miles and Mangold, 2014). By using social
media, employees’social networks grow, as does their understanding of their colleagues and
customers, along with their expertise, knowledge and networks. These ties, and the benefits
they offer individuals and organizations, are referred to as social capital (Nahapiet and
Ghoshal, 1998).
What’s in it for
me and you?
47
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