CHS: Small: Intra-Organizational Boundary Spanning: Strategic Implications for the Design, Implementation, and Use of Enterprise Social Media

本项目将探讨企业社交媒体（ESM）在加强组织间跨界沟通和协作组织绩效方面的潜力。在美国，提高组织群体的绩效对产业成功和组织的经济竞争力至关重要。该研究将为无害环境管理工具的战略设计和组织实施提供影响，以增强其对协作和创新的影响，并为旨在唤起和加强其他网络-人类系统中的协作和跨越边界的无害环境管理平台的设计提供具体准则。该项目还将为学生的教育和培训制作相关材料，其动机是最近的两项科学发展。一方面，人们越来越认识到有必要研究群体中的社交媒体，并探索其支持一系列群体和组织成果的潜力。另一方面，最近关于跨界的文献提出，有必要将重点转移到虚拟环境，特别是评估虚拟工具（如无害环境管理）的使用如何影响跨界的成功。本研究回应这两个发展的纵向，多层次，混合方法的实证研究之间的关系ESM的使用和组织内边界跨越。该研究将解决四个相关的研究问题：1）使用ESM发生的跨边界活动的类型; 2）这些活动对团队绩效的影响; 3）团队虚拟程度的影响;以及4）嵌入在ESM平台中的启示和隐私设置对边界跨越和团队有效性的影响。所提出的方法需要一个动态的多模态网络分析与混合方法的数据补充，提供了一个过程性的理解ESM对组织内边界跨越和组的性能的影响。这项研究将为ESM和边界跨越文献提供一些贡献。首先，它将有助于开发一个概念和操作工具，以了解无害环境管理如何支持跨界。第二，该项目将有助于了解无害环境管理在群体间和组织内的使用情况，从而扩大目前在社交媒体文献中占主导地位的个人层面的关注。第三，该项目将有助于理解（a）虚拟工具在支持跨边界活动方面的有效性，（B）支持这些活动的网络关系的最佳配置，以及（c）其他节点变量和纽带特征对无害环境管理使用、跨边界和协作团体绩效之间关系的影响。

This project will explore the potential of enterprise social media (ESM) for enhancing inter-group cross-boundary communications and performance of collaborative organizational groups. Enhancing the performance of organizational groups is critical to industrial success and the economic competitiveness of organizations in the United States. The study will provide implications for the strategic design and organizational implementation of ESM tools to enhance their impact on collaboration and innovation and offer specific guidelines for the design of ESM platforms aimed at evoking and enhancing collaboration and boundary spanning in other cyber-human systems. The project will also produce relevant materials for the education and training of students.This project is motivated by two recent scientific developments. On the one hand, there is growing recognition of the need to study social media in groups and to explore its potential for supporting a range of group and organizational outcomes. On the other hand, the recent literature on boundary-spanning has proposed the need for shifting the focus to virtual contexts and in particular assessing how the use of virtual tools (e.g. ESM) affects boundary-spanning success. This study responds to both developments with a longitudinal, multi-level, and mixed-method empirical study of the relations between ESM use and intra-organizational boundary spanning. The research will address four related research questions: 1) the types of boundary-spanning activities that occur using ESM; 2) the effect of these activities on group performance; 3) the impact of a group's degree of virtuality; and 4) the effect of the affordances and privacy settings embedded in the ESM platform on boundary spanning and group effectiveness. The proposed approach entails a dynamic multimodal network analysis complemented with mixed-method data for providing a processual understanding of the effect of ESM on intra-organizational boundary spanning and group performance. The study will provide several contributions to the ESM and boundary spanning literature. First, it will contribute to the development of a conceptual and operational apparatus for understanding how ESM supports boundary spanning. Second, the project will contribute an understanding of ESM use at the inter-group and intra-organizational level, thereby extending the current individual-level focus that has dominated much of the social media literature. Third, the project will contribute an understanding of the (a) effectiveness of virtual tools in supporting boundary-spanning activities, (b) the optimal configurations of network relations for supporting these activities, and (c) the effect of other node variables and tie characteristics on the relation between ESM use, boundary spanning, and the performance of collaborative groups.