Social Media Correlates of Organizational Climate

The dissertation was defended successfully today! My sincere thanks to the committee and the Univ. of Hawaii Communication and Information Sciences Program. I'll be posting a few findings here and of course the search is on for a traditional journal publication.
Here is a sample: Those who use social media at work tend to be more trusting of top management. This is correlation not causality.
BTW -- anything posted here can be used by others as long as it is attributed.

Facebook the clear winner at work

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Here's a tidbit from my research on organizational climate and social media use. Facebook is the clear winner at work over other social media sites. Does much better than the more business-oriented LinkedIn. I suspect that ease of use, huge membership and zero cost are the reasons. For many businesses Facebook is quite adequate for enhancing the external network of its people.
The data from my sample out of the Syracuse University Study Response pool. Selected were people in the U.S., 18 or over, and employed at least half time.

HR Advocacy via Communication

Satish Kumar pointed out in a recent post that HR could and should be the advocate of employees as well as just serve the executives. Beyond processing documents (virtual or real), he recommends expanded roles:
"Fostering effective methods of goal setting, communication and empowerment through responsibility, builds employee ownership of the organization. The HR professional helps establish the organizational culture and climate in which people have the competency, concern and commitment to serve customers well."
It strikes me that social media are excellent low-cost methods to help HR become the "employee advocate" as well as the "change champion." Support of social media sends a message (McLuhan would agree I think) that HR is not just a rule enforcer. Think of a blog / wiki as a continuously running employee survey.

Building Trust

There are several references to trust in Wikipatterns, a book that I enjoyed reading recently and about which I posted some comments this blog. While I believe the claims wikis and trust are true, there is little if any research to support them. The importance is that social media – see my hypothesis – are worth investing in because they improve the organizational climate as well as share knowledge and add to social capital. Improved organizational climate fosters better productivity. There is plenty of evidence to support that claim.

These are the main references to trust that I found:

Geoffrey Corb at Johns Hopkins: “We have found that people involved in our projects are more well informed than ever before. Trust has strengthened between project participants and stakeholders since our operations are more transparent than ever before.”(Mader, 2008, p. 39)

“Wikis shift the social balance away from control and closer to trust.”(p. 49)

“Closed systems implicitly assume that people can’t be trusted and technology has to be relied on to control access to information. This encourages an organizational culture where people don’t trust each other and are concerned with maintaining control over information access. . . .

“Fundamentally open tools such as the wiki encourage just the opposite. Their design assumes that people can be trusted with the information they have access to, and will use it responsibly to further shared goals. This encourages a culture where people do trust each other, and involve others in their work to build the best possible end product in less time and with less unnecessary back and forth effort. . . .”(pp. 50-51)

“A wiki thrives on active participation by as many people as possible, and in turn brings greater value to each individual user. It relied on transparency, trust, and willingness to share information more openly, work more collaboratively, and see information as more valuable when more people have access to it.”(p. 121)

I believe the benefits claimed for wikis and my research needs a few (anonymous) firms where I may add some social media use questions to employee surveys to test my hypothesis on the subject of trust.

Reference

Mader, S. (2008). Wikipatterns. Indianapolis IN: Wiley.

Research update -- signs of significance

There has been lots going on personally here with the granddaughter's first birthday and visitors in town. Dissertation work continues and it is a pleasure to work with data even if the results are not as clear as one would like. I'm sure that there are other stat packages comparable to SPSS but I continue to be impressed by the ability to concentrate on the data and not the mechanics of running computations.
Here's the latest:
In the current pilot study phase with senior college students and a few MBA students, the scales for trust in fellow employees, trust in management, knowledge exchange & combination, and job satisfaction have satisfactory reliability.
There is a positive correlation between time spent posting to social media away from work and trust in fellow employees. Otherwise nothing reaches statistical significance.
Lesson learned so far in the pilot: My "social media use index" needs some work so I'm revising and shortening the questionnnaire.
Comments are always welcome.

Psychological climate benefits . . .

We can consider psychological climate as individual employees’ experiences of organizational climate. (I know there is a distinction.) Recent research in India by Biswas & Varma (2007) found that organizational citizenship behavior and job satisfaction mediated between psychological climate and employee performance. The survey questions and constructs are similar to ones in my investigation on social media and organizational climate.
I’m looking for opportunities for surveys in US firms to add to my surveys of MBA students. There is no conflict between research and theory on the one hand, and practical employee attitude surveys on the other.

The reference is
Biswas, Soumendu & Varma, Arup (2007). Psychological climate and individual performance in India: test of a mediated model. Employee Relations, 29(6), pp. 664 – 676.

Free organizational climate surveys

One of my dissertation surveys is now "on the street" so to speak. It feels good to be collecting data.
If you would like a free, professionally-done organizational climate survey for your company, just contact me. You get anonymous results for your firm and I get de-identified data for my research on blogging and social media -- Web 2.0 -- use. Customized questions can easily be included, for example on evaluation of your employee blogs.

Dissertation Proposal Approved

Got some good advice and approval 9/28/07. The main needs are to further narrow the focus and define the type of internal organizational blog that I ask about.
Grudin & Efimova make the point in their HICSS 2007 paper about blogs at Microsoft that corporate blogs and employee blogs are different. Team blogs are were said not to be common.
Juech & Stobbe have a 2005 paper on the Deutsche Bank Research site with a classification scheme from a German-language paper by Zerfass. It's suggestive but I don't think that it illustrates the full overlap of information and social purposes of blogs.
My proposal did suggest some dimensions of blogging experience for individual respondents. I'll be refining my definition and in the process I may define a blogging index.
I'm grateful to be "launched"

Organizational Climate and Blog Policy

Blogger or not, please take a moment for one of my surveys. The links are in the left sidebar.
Mahalo!