BE
SOCIAL AND BE (MORE) COMPETITIVE!
By Pia Nielsen and Liana Razmerita
Department of International Business Communication
More and more companies are
becoming more ’social’ in terms of doing business by deploying social platforms
for internal communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing. Recent
consultancy reports¹ and academic studies show that these companies,
potentially, can gain considerable business value and competitive advantage IF
these platforms are adopted and used by the employees.
Based on an empirical quantitative
study with 114 participants, the article (Nielsen & Razmerita, 2014)
investigates employee motivation in Danish companies and aims at determining
which factors affect employees’ knowledge sharing through social media in a
working environment. Our findings pinpoint towards the potential social media
have for enhancing internal communication, knowledge sharing and collaboration
in organizations, but the adoption is low, at this point, due to mainly
organizational and individual factors. Technological factors do not seem to
affect employees’ motivation for knowledge sharing as much as previous research
has found, but it is the influence from the combination of individual and
organizational factors, which seem to affect the adoption of the platforms in line with findings presented in (Razmerita et al., 2014).
KEY FINDINGS pinpoint towards the facts that
Knowledge sharing is not a ‘social
dilemma’. Knowledge does not seem to be power. The study shows a
positive development in employees’ willingness to share knowledge, because
knowledge sharing is considered more beneficial than to hoard it.
Relevance is king.
Employees are concerned with providing relevant and valuable content, since the
essence of knowledge sharing trough social media is to provide value to
colleagues and the organization.
Motivation is key. The
study shows that, due to several factors, only few employees have adopted social
media for knowledge sharing and those employees, still share knowledge
primarily, through traditional communication channels such as email and
face-to-face meetings.
