Overcoming the “Ideology of Openness”: Probing the Affordances of Social Media for Organizational Knowledge Sharing

Abstract

This study explores the ways in which the affordances of social media not only increase open communication and knowledge sharing, but also promote covert behavior, creating dialectical tensions for distributed workers that must be communicatively managed. Drawing on a case study of the engineering division of a distributed high tech start-up, we find our participants navigate tensions in visibility-invisibility, engagement-disengagement, and sharing-control and strategically manage these tensions to preserve both openness and ambiguity. These findings highlight ways in which organizational members limit as well as share knowledge through social media, and the productive role of tensions in enabling them to attend to multiple goals.