Social Engineering: An Investigation on Information Sharing via Micro-Blogging Within a Geographically Diverse Sales Engineering Organization

  • Raymond Martinez

    Student thesis: Doctoral ThesisDoctor of Philosophy

    Abstract

    The micro-blog is a character-limited blog technology where participants, in principle, can connect to and exchange information with colleagues from all over the world. The popular micro-blogging service Twitter has been widely adopted by the public, but in the corporate world a certain level of internalization is needed, and enterprise micro-blogging services play a role similar to Twitter but within a single organization. This paper presents a research proposal on how enterprise micro-blogging services like Slack, Teams, Chatter and Yammer affect internal knowledge sharing in multi-national organizations. By examining the use of this relatively new technology and the role it plays in organizational communication, study presents the effect that it has on knowledge sharing. It also looks to contribute to the growing body of literature examining the relationship between organizational knowledge sharing and computer-mediated communication technologies (CMC). Knowledge sharing was the focus of this study. The study examined the drivers which influence the employee’s use of the CMC in the context of adherence to micro-blogging. A survey instrument was used to measure the employee’s reasons for using CMCs and their perceived value of them. The survey was administered through Microsoft Forms and was completed by more than 400 employees. The findings of this study indicate that the employees find that the CMCs are valuable tools for sharing and locating information. Overall, they use CMCs daily to post and retrieve information and are building active online communities that contribute to the overall success of the organization. The factors that drive this behavior are both technical and psychological. The CMCs themselves with features that encourage participation through alerts and mobile apps. Also, good old-fashioned pride in ones work and recognition from peers drives participation as well. A virtual thumbs up or clapping hands emoji seems to go a long way.
    Date of AwardJan 1 2021
    Original languageEnglish
    SupervisorSouren Paul (Supervisor), Ling Wang (Advisor) & James Parrish (Advisor)

    Cite this

    '