Social Media Communication in the Workplace: Evidence From Public Employees’ Networks

Abstract

Although public employees increasingly utilize social media in the workplace, public management scholarship has provided little evidence on how public employees use such tools and what role they play in professional networks. Public organizations struggle to balance policies encouraging social media use for communication and regulations that prevent time wasting or security issues. We suggest that an examination of social media communication patterns can guide public organizations to design organizational policies and address internal social media use. Combining a network approach with insights from communication and social media studies, we investigate how closeness, proximity, interactions, and resources predict public employees’ communication on social media. We develop and test a multilevel model using 2014 egocentric network data among 2,362 employees in a U.S. public university. We find that social media communication in public organizations is explained by proximity, closeness, and social interactions rather than professional interactions and access to resources.