Jeffrey William Treem

Social Media Use in Organizations: Exploring the Affordances of Visibility, Editability, Persistence, and Association

The use of social media technologies - such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, social tagging, and microblogging - is proliferating at an incredible pace. One area of increasing adoption is organizational settings where managers hope that these new technologies will help improve important organizational processes. However, scholarship has largely failed to explain if and how uses of social media in organizations differ from existing forms of computer-mediated communication. In this chapter, we argue that social media are of important consequence to organizational communication processes because they afford behaviors that were difficult or impossible to achieve in combination before these new technologies entered the workplace. Our review of previous studies of social media use in organizations uncovered four relatively consistent affordances enabled by these new technologies: Visibility, persistence, editability, and association. We suggest that the activation of some combination of these affordances could influence many of the processes commonly studied by organizational communication theorists. To illustrate this point, we theorize several ways through which these four social media affordances may alter socialization, information sharing, and power processes in organizations.

The Connectivity Paradox: Using Technology to Both Decrease and Increase Perceptions of Distance in Distributed Work Arrangements

This manuscript is one of many in a special issue of the Journal of Applied Communication Research on “Communication and Distance,” Volume 38, No. 1. Distributed work arrangements are gaining in popularity. Such arrangements are enabled through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Problematically, the same ICTs that are implemented to overcome distance felt in these settings can also create the expectation of constant connectivity for individuals, constructing a paradox for teleworkers who find the potential benefits of distributed work negated by the very technologies that made the arrangement possible. To combat this problem, teleworkers sometimes use their ICTs strategically to decrease, rather than increase, the distance they feel from colleagues. Findings indicate this strategic use of ICTs to increase distance are often covert, such that teleworkers can appear to colleagues as if they are working in a manner similar to how they would at an office while, at the same time, reaping the benefits of not being in a central location.

Knowledge management technology as a stage for strategic self-presentation: Implications for knowledge sharing in organizations

This article explores why it is often difficult for organizations to capture, store, and share employees individually held expertise. Drawing on studies of the social construction of expertise and theories of transactive memory systems and self-presentation in computer-mediated environments, we argue that knowledge management technologies are not simple containers for the storage of expertise, but that they are stages upon which individuals enact performances of expertise. Through a longitudinal study of the work of IT technicians we show that users of a knowledge management technology strategically craft their own information entries to position themselves as experts vis-a-vis their coworkers. The data suggest that proactive self-presentations enacted by a few actors early on may spur reactive behaviors of strategic self-presentation across the organization. We explore implications of these findings for theories of transactive memory systems and technology use in organizations.

The Social Behaviors of Experts in Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

We examine the social behaviors of game experts in Everquest II, a popular massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMO). We rely on exponential random graph models (ERGM) to examine the anonymous privacy-protected social networks of 1,457 players over a five-day period. We find that those who achieve the most in the game send and receive more communication, while those who perform the most efficiently at the game show no difference in communication behavior from other players. Both achievement and performance experts tend to communicate with those at similar expertise levels, and higher-level experts are more likely to receive communication from other players.

Communicating Expertise: Knowledge Performances in Professional-Service Firms

Researchers in many disciplines treat expertise as an individually held attribute that allows for consistently superior performance in a specific domain. However, in knowledge-intensive environments, where work practices are ill-defined, invisible, and their outputs are ambiguous, attributions of expertise are not likely to emerge solely from objective criteria such as task performance or professional standing. This study offers an alternative communicative view of expertise arguing that attributions of expertise are developed from visible performances of knowledge in the practice of work. Using qualitative data collected from fieldwork at two public relations organizations, this work develops themes regarding the attribution of expertise in knowledge-intensive firms and then shows that experts are more likely than nonexperts to perform behaviors reflective of those themes. Findings suggest that attributions of expertise in knowledge-intensive organizations emerge through social interactions and are produced by and a product of communicative acts.

The Many Faces of Mentoring in an MMORPG

Mentoring refers to the phenomenon where a more skilled or knowledgeable person helps a less skilled or less knowledgeable person gain skill in a particular domain. In this paper we study the phenomenon of mentoring in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). We identify four different types of mentoring, which map to several important motivational features. We then measure the social networks of mentors at multiple levels, and propose a network model to describe the emergence and evolution of mentoring.

Knowing Who Knows What: Information Technology, Knowledge Visibility, and Organizational Change

The current application of transactive memory theory to the use of knowledge management systems takes expertise as a central and relatively stable concept. However, expertise is a socially defined and contextually dependent construct. The present study examines how knowledge management tools can facilitate negotiations of expertise by displaying knowledge that was previously invisible to group members. This visible knowledge is then used to ascribe expertise to individuals and determine task assignments. In recognizing this function of the knowledge management system, group members may strategically monitor what information they and others contribute in order to position themselves as experts in particular domains. The implications of technologies that make individual knowledge visible to group members are discussed.