Hybrid social media: employees’ use of a boundary‐spanning technology

• Author: Ben Marder,Thomas Calvard,Tina Kowalski,Chris Archer‐Brown
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12103
• Published date: 01 March 2018
• Date: 01 March 2018

74 New Technology, Work and Employment © 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

New Technology, Work and Employment 33:1

ISSN 1468-005X

Hybrid social media: employees’ use of a

boundary- spanning technology

Chris Archer-Brown , Ben Marder, Thomas Calvard and

Tina Kowalski

Improved employee collaboration and communication can be

facilitated by social technologies that extend within and beyond

organisations. These social technologies have increasingly

come to be represented by social media sites, which are used to

extend workplace relationships across personal and profession-

al boundaries in a hybrid role. This presents opportunities and

risks as those boundaries are collapsed. Using boundary man-

agement as a theoretical lens, we evaluate the associations of

relationship initiation between colleagues at different levels of

organisations with employees’ strategies and their well- being.

We also investigate relationships with social media usage, age

and propensity to self- monitor and group employees using clus-

ter analysis. We consider implications of our findings for devel-

oping more sophisticated policies, training and guidance for em-

ployees on the use of social media as a workplace tool.

Keywords: social media, boundary management, workplace

relationships, employee collaboration, professional networks,

work-life, multiple audiences

Introduction

Early attention in social media research focused on personal perspectives (e.g. Boyd

and Ellison, 2008) and considered social media in the workplace to be a distraction

(Coker, 2011). Recently, researchers have considered the adoption of social media in an

enterprise context (von Krogh, 2012; Leonardi et al., 2013) where benefits are derived

as a result of transcending organisations structures (Chui et al., 2012). However, im-

plicit in much social media research has been the assumption of separate personal

versus professional or internal versus external boundaries; whereas the reality would

arguably be better described in terms of co- existing, overlapping personal and profes-

sional networks, and therefore to conceptualise social media purely along an inside—

outside organisational continuum is problematic.

To manage their social boundaries, users may resort to various strategies involving

multiple profiles for targeted audiences, or presenting content that conforms to

expectations of certain audiences (Hogan, 2010; Stutzman and Hartzog, 2012). Figure 1

Chris Archer-Brown, (chris.archerbrown@falmouth.ac.uk) Professor of Digital Entrepreneurship, Fal-

mouth University. Interests: Digital economy, boundary management, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Dr Ben Marder, Lecturer in Marketing, University of Edinburgh. Interests: branding, multiple audience

management in social media, tourism.

Dr Thomas Calvard, Lecturer in Human Resource Management, University of Edinburgh. Interests:

Diversity Management, Technology and Empathy and Perspective- taking.

Dr Tina Kowalski, Lecturer in Human Resource Management, University of York. Interests: Well-

being, health effects of organisational change and technology.

© 2018 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and Hybrid social media 75

John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

summarises this perspective, indicating how the overlapping nature of social media

sites challenge traditional boundaries for employees; with a spectrum from purely per-

sonal platforms to the left and purely professional ones to the right. In the middle, we

describe those that span both domains as Hybrid Social Media (HSM) sites, which

recognises an increasingly complex, multifaceted social media landscape, where it is

necessary for employees to compartmentalise their digital footprint.

Managing what is visible in social media across different groups of acquaintances,

friends and family members is fraught with complexity and risks (Sayah, 2013). In

many cases users manage such ‘context collapse’ in the personal domain by conform-

ing with the expectations of the most critical members of the user’s personal relation-

ship groups (Hogan, 2010; Marder et al., 2016). A teenager who is happy to connect

with a grandparent on a well- managed Facebook profile might be less comfortable

with the same relative following her Instagram or viewing a Snapchat story.

Conversely, constrained the rules and norms of interactions between employees in

the same organisation, the recent advent of social technologies in the workplace pro-

vides opportunities to enhance professional relationships (Huang et al., 2015), develop

social capital, share knowledge and collaborate more effectively (Leonardi et al., 2013).

However, where social media connections span personal and professional domains,

levels of anxiety have been noted to increase further (Karl and Peluchette, 2011) where

employers are the most likely to cause this effect (Marder et al., 2017).

Table 1 considers the distinctive boundary management issues facing employees us-

ing different platforms. HSM presents opportunities for communication and collabora-

tion, but also presents the greatest risk of conflict and anxiety due to multiple boundary

management challenges. HSM is therefore understood as a platform that has the po-

tential to provide both professional and personal utility but which, paradoxically, pre-

sents the greatest risk of audience collapse with its consequent challenges. Consequently,

employees may experience simultaneous positive and negative reactions on receiving

a relationship initiation from colleagues, that is a friend or connection request.

Consideration of boundary- spanning in social media must take account of employees’

social and professional contexts and recognise that the issues presented are very differ-

ent depending on the exact social network, platform or site in question.

Figure 1: Overlapping social and professional spheres in social media