Social Networking in the Workplace: Allowing for Social Influence

Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs, and Twitter are just some of the tools employees are using to network. In the past few years, networking has become a hot topic and people are actively seeking out environments in which to network.

So, besides being a factor in employees' social lives outside of work, what can it do in the workplace and for (or to) the organization?

Inside the workplace, not only are employees connected to each other by the Internet, they physically connected, waiting and watching what their colleagues think, decide, and do. Increased awareness of the value of social networking has increased the perceived power of social influence within the workplace. People are more influenced by people they know than people they do not know when making decisions. People trust the individuals they feel that they know - and this can have effects on the workplace.

The effects of social networking can be both positive and negative for the workplace. The positives include: greater cultural cohesion inside the organization and an influence strategy for leaders. The negatives: increased employee dissatisfaction, since everybody in the office is connected and can share information about bonuses, promotions, discipline cases etc.

Organizations need to think about how to manage the events that happen as well as employees' perceptions of those events. People are also connected to other people outside the organizations so they are continually making comparisons, this can have an enormous effect on morale and culture as much as anything inside the organization. Another impact of social networking is that it loosens the control of employee attitudes and behaviour by avoiding the influence of formal managerial power.

The level of social networking is different among the younger generation than among the baby boomers so there are differences to consider when looking at the effects of social networking in the workplace.

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Posted by: suhujitha on 2009-02-05 15:24:40

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