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.

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.