Impact of Employees’ Web Socio-Networking Activism on Career Prospects

Abstract

Curious minds gain wisdom by networking more and seek efforts to perform better. Web-based social networking has grown multi-fold and has become an integral part of individual's lives and business environment. Facebook alone has about 1.5 billion users and is growing. Web Socio-Networking (WSN) fosters communication and is useful to expand business contacts and to reach out enormous subscribers. WSN has become increasing pervasive at workplace. Networking is important to organisations and individuals and WSN provides the convergence of technology with human interaction interface to build relationships with external, internal and known contacts. Hence, organisations need to develop an efficient WSN usage strategy to heighten its capability. Although WSN is not new, enterprises are now contemplating its effects on its people and organisation performance. This paper examines the positive and negative perceptional impact of hyper usage of social networking sites at workplace on career management processes. This paper does not argue the implications of hyper usage of WSN at workplace on the organisational outcomes. To ascertain the impact on career management processes, this paper applies empirical and statistical analysis on the data obtained by primary survey undertaken for about 8 months, to obtain responses from over 1000 employee professionals across 50 countries, from varied industry segments and organisations. The practical application of this study is strategic and contemporary, as the findings will be valuable for organisations, employees, institutions, and active users of social networking sites.