Team Boundary Spanning through Enterprise Social Media: Exploring the Effects of Group-Level Diversity Using a Data Science Approach

Effective work groups engage in team boundary spanning, that is, the use of communication ties as conduits to critical external resources. With the proliferation of social media technologies in enterprise settings and the associated increase in visibility of communication ties, understanding their i...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Van Osch, Wietske, Steinfield, Charles, Zhao, Yanjie
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Blogs
Boundaries
Boundary Spanning
Collaboration
Conduits
Conferences
Cultural differences
Data Sience
Digital media
Frequency diversity
Group Diversity
Group Visibility
Knowledge Management
Machine learning
Media
Organizational Teams
Organizations
Social network services
Social networks
Visibility
Online Access:Request full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Effective work groups engage in team boundary spanning, that is, the use of communication ties as conduits to critical external resources. With the proliferation of social media technologies in enterprise settings and the associated increase in visibility of communication ties, understanding their impact on boundary spanning becomes imperative to improving cross-boundary knowledge creation and management inside organizations. In this paper, drawing on log data from 415 unique work groups in an enterprise social media (ESM) system, we use a machine learning approach to automatically detect three distinct team boundary-spanning activities. Using zero-inflated poisson regressions, we further show the effect of group visibility as well as three distinct sources of group structural diversity -- geographic, functional, and hierarchical -- on the extent to which teams engage in boundary spanning through ESM. Implications for theory and practice around the use of data science approaches as well as visibility and diversity constructs for understanding team boundary spanning are discussed.
ISSN:1530-1605
2572-6862
1530-1605
DOI:10.1109/HICSS.2016.274