In particular, policies presented visibility, persistence, and editability, as factors increasing the probability for sensitive organizational information to become accessible to and manipulable by diverse external audiences. After each of the coding rounds, we reviewed our respective coding, fully reconciled discrepancies through discussions, and consolidated our findings. Social media have therefore rendered traditional managerial and technical tools of IT governance, such as budgets, technical investments, human resources, and training, etc. GSA encourages the use of social media technologies to enhance communication, collaboration, and information exchange in support of GSA's mission. 65, No. Several policies included statements encouraging employees to use social media to Foster Community, that is, to develop connections between themselves and others. Schmidt G. B., Lelchook A. M., Martin J. E. The relationship between social media co-worker connections and work-related attitudes, The network awareness tool: A web 2.0 tool to visualize informal networked learning in organizations. We thus examine policies to explore what they reveal about how organizations construct four affordances of social media in organizational contexts (Treem & Leonardi, 2012)visibility, persistence, editability, and associationand how they attempt to govern social media in the workplace. The emphasis on the latter elementWhat Not To Posthowever, diminished in policies enacted later in the observation period, while recommendations regarding What To Post remained stable. (PDF) Social Media Affordances and Constraints: Design, Use and Implications for Enterprises Social Media Affordances and Constraints: Design, Use and Implications for Enterprises Authors:. Ollier-Malaterre A., Rothbard N., Berg J. Request for management's or designated authority's approval of social media. Social affordance is a type of affordance. Too much of a good thing? We did not uncover meaningful differences in how particular industries or industry groupings perceived and responded to social media affordances, but it would be fascinating to analyze this at a deeper level to be able to identify and interpret emerging cross-industry patterns. Policies enacted at different dates therefore suggested a transformation in organizations' perception of and reaction to social media affordances over time. In addition, we identified a third type of associationthat between employees and organization. 1, pp. This study explores how social media are integrated into the communication strategies of sellers in a business-to-business e-commerce context using an affordances approach to analysis. E-mail and organizational communication: Does saying Hi really matter? (, Foote, D. A., Seipel, S. J., Johnson, N. B., & Duffy, M. K. (, Freyne, J., Berkovsky, S., Daly, E. M., & Geyer, W. (, Huang, R., Zmud, R. W., & Price, L. R. (, Kane, G. C., Fichman, R. G., Gallaugher, J., & Glaser, J. The purpose of this policy is to assure communications in online communities made on behalf of Sutter Health or its affiliates are consistent with the organizations' Employee Handbooks and Standards for Business Conduct, policies and applicable laws, including laws concerning privacy, confidentiality, copyright and trademarks. [Sutter Health]. 43-72). The resulting coding scheme included 17 codespolicy elementsdefined and illustrated in Table 1. You must make sure you do not disclose or use Kaiser Permanente confidential or proprietary information or that of any other person or company on any blog. [Kaiser Permanente]. Appendix A lists the organizations included in the sample, along with their industry affiliations and policy enactment date, whenever available. 43, No. 4, pp. Social Media Affordances on Online Communal Knowledge Sharing", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. Treem and Leonardi (2012) argued that these four affordances are associated with a wide range of features provided by social media (e.g. 2, 16 February 2022 | Academy of Management Journal, Vol. Policies recognized but put less emphasis on editability. The emphasis score of this policy element, while generally remaining high, decreased towards the end of the observation period. Policies thus increasingly stated that Organizations [Saw] Value in social media and presented Organizational Support of Social Media: Hamilton County Department of Job and Family Services has embraced social media as a means to improve openness, accessibility and transparency. In addition to these two types of association, we also discovered that policies hinted at another type of association, between employees and the organization as a whole. Mayo Clinic's Social Media Team provides oversight and assistance to guide development of new social media platforms, sharing knowledge and instituting best practices for successful implementation. [Mayo Clinic]. 41, no. Luo N., Guo X., Zhang J., Chen G., Zhang N. Understanding the continued use of intra-organizational blogs: An adaptive habituation model, Workplace romance 2.0: Developing a communication ethics model to address potential sexual harassment from inappropriate social media contacts between coworkers. We also recoded the documents used for the development of the coding protocol to accomplish consistency. doi = "10.1080/10864415.2021.1846855". Our findings concerning the responses offered by the policies to tackle these new social media risks, however, were more intriguing. Through a systematic literature review, the characteristics of affordances research in social media are uncovered: the most prominent areas of application, research approaches, and dominant typologies and conceptualisations. We used Atlas.ti software to facilitate the coding process throughout the entire analysis. This paper examines how organizations perceive affordances of social media and how they react to their employees' use of social media through policies, a key means of organizational governance. Always demonstrate respect for others' points of view, even when they're not offering the same in return. We now turn our attention to the subset of 45 policies for which the enactment date was known. [DePaul University]. In this regard, we checked for meaningful differences in organizational policies according to industry. Request for personal identification and transparency with regard to organizational affiliation. Our analysis of social media policies revealed that organizations tended to perceive and portray affordances of social media primarily as a source of risk rather than value. They are action potentials (Majchrzak & Markus, 2013) constituted by the relationships between the technical (material) features of social media and the people who perceive and use them. This research added to the affordance perspective by providing an empirical examination of how organizational policies reflect and contribute to the shaping of social media affordances in the workplace. Investigating social media uses, danah boyd (2011) identifies four sets of affordances: persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are all popular for sharing ideas, photographs, videos and stories to satisfy the human need to reach out and experience a social connection. Dive into the research topics of 'Social Media Affordances to Engage Clients During the Sales Process: Sequential versus Multiplex Media Use'. Social Media Affordances. Enter your email address below and we will send you your username, If the address matches an existing account you will receive an email with instructions to retrieve your username, Technology Management Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University. In contrast with traditional IT, social media applications are user-friendly and often are available for free or at low cost. 4, 25 April 2018 | Academy of Management Review, Vol. social networking websites such as Facebook, microblogging platforms such as Twitter). 624-642). Theoretically, this finding reveals that affordances are not independent and that in order to better understand how affordances are constructed and how they shape use, researchers need to consider not only individual affordances in isolation but also the complex interrelations among the affordances as technically and socially constructed. 6, No. To explore this topic, social media posts across 5 online platforms (Google Groups, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr) were collected during 2020-2021. The following paragraphs provide details on the two key trends we identified. As social media were becoming more widespread and familiar, organizations started to devote more human, technological, and financial resources to their management in the organizational context. With persistence, social media allow for content previously created and published to remain permanently accessible (Wagner & Majchrzak, 2006). What Is Social Media? Therefore, employee use of social media does not require an allocated budget, training, or other traditional resources that organizations typically controlled via IT governance mechanisms (Sambamurthy & Zmud, 1999, 2000; Weill, 2004). Organizational policies are documents that present guiding principles on a particular topic (e.g. Overall, this research yielded several theoretical contributions to the affordance perspective on social media and to our understanding of the organizational governance of social media. Similarly, the affordance of persistence appeared in policies through statements that directly acknowledged that everything that employees did in social media would remain accessible for an extended period: Remember that whatever you post may live for many years in the Web, even after you delete your copy of it. (Gartner). Significant blurriness of the term 'affordance' is identified as well as an inconsistent use in research. Exploring apparatuses of valuation in the travel sector, Genre repertoire: The structuring of communicative practices in organizations. Thus, in order to deal with the new risks generated by employee use of social media, policies tended to rely heavily on generic rules and regulations that organizations already had in place. The formulation of policies has long been one of the most prevalent tools employed by managers to communicate the formal position of an organization on a variety of matters, including IT and traditional media (e.g. For instance, social networking websites are explicitly built upon the social ties of their members (Boyd & Ellison, 2008). Sheppard, F 2014, A brief history of the internet over the past 20 years and the role of the World Wide Web, viewed 19 July 2019,