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）在加强团队间跨界沟通和协作组织团队绩效方面的潜力。在美国，提高组织团体的绩效对工业成功和组织的经济竞争力至关重要。该研究将为ESM工具的战略设计和组织实施提供启示，以增强其对协作和创新的影响，并为旨在唤起和增强其他网络-人类系统中的协作和边界跨越的ESM平台的设计提供具体指导。该项目还将为教育和培训学生制作相关材料。这个项目是由最近的两项科学发展推动的。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，最近关于边界跨越的文献提出有必要将重点转移到虚拟环境中，特别是评估虚拟工具（例如ESM）的使用如何影响边界跨越的成功。本研究通过纵向、多层次和混合方法的实证研究，对ESM的使用与组织内部边界跨越之间的关系进行了回应。该研究将解决四个相关的研究问题：1)使用ESM发生的跨界活动的类型；2)这些活动对群体绩效的影响；3)群体虚拟程度的影响；4) ESM平台内嵌入的允诺性和隐私设置对边界跨越和群体有效性的影响。建议的方法需要一个动态的多模式网络分析，辅以混合方法数据，以提供对ESM对组织内部边界跨越和团队绩效影响的过程理解。该研究将为ESM和边界跨越文献提供一些贡献。首先，它将有助于概念和操作设备的发展，以理解ESM如何支持边界跨越。其次，该项目将有助于理解群体间和组织内层面的ESM使用，从而扩展当前主导大部分社交媒体文献的个人层面的关注。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ESM使用、跨界和协作群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.