Voicing job satisfaction and dissatisfaction through Twitter: employees’ use of cyberspace

Abstract

This article adopts a work orientations perspective to consider how, through the medium of Twitter, employees voice the things they love and hate about their jobs. Using 817,235 tweets posted by 650,958 users in the calendar year 2014, the findings provide new insights into both employee voice and job satisfaction/dissatisfaction as well as an enhanced understanding of the employment relationship. First, the findings indicate that Twitter, in its expression of very personal and individualistic needs, might be considered a new form of employee voice. Second, Twitter captures the positive, the negative and the ambivalence in the notion of job satisfaction. Third, the description of the methodology used to access and analyse Twitter data illustrates how new methodological approaches, particularly those embedded within computer science, may be of value to social scientists in their analysis of ‘Big Data’.