Corporate Blogging and Job Performance: Effects of Work-related and Nonwork-related Participation

Abstract

Corporate blogs are expected to facilitate communication, knowledge sharing, and collaborative innovation within organizations. However, empirical evidence has yet to be found illustrating whether and how such applications have affected job performance. Drawing upon social network theory, we postulate a conceptual model suggesting that employees’ online social relationships accumulated through work- and nonwork-related blog participation will engender different effects on job performance. The model is empirically tested using digital trace and archival data collected from two in-practice systems of a large telecommunications company. The results reveal that, in the work-related blog network, the structural and cognitive dimensions of social relationships positively affect job performance, whereas the relational dimension shows a negative influence. Meanwhile, participation in nonwork-related blog network benefits job performance for employees with a high level of performance in the previous time period, but is detrimental for other employees. The findings uncover the influencing mechanism of corporate blogging on job performance and offer practical advice for managers to better exploit the value of intraorganizational social media.

Key words and phrases:

• blogs
• corporate blogs
• digital traces
• job performance
• organizational social media
• social capital
• social network

Acknowledgments

This work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 71490721, 71572092, 71110107027) and the MOE Project of the Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Universities of China (grant number 12JJD630001).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benjiang Lu

Benjiang Lu is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. His research interests focus on intraorganizational use of social media.

Xunhua Guo

Xunhua Guo (corresponding author; [email protected]) is an associate professor of information systems at the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University. He received his Ph.D. in management science and engineering from that university. His research interests focus on electronic commerce, social networks, and business intelligence.

Nianlong Luo

Nianlong Luo is an associate professor at the Information Technology Center of Tsinghua University. He received his Ph.D. in management science and engineering from that university. His research interests focus on social media and organizational behavior.

Guoqing Chen

Guoqing Chen is EMC Chair Professor of Information Systems at the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University. He received his Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. His research interests include IT management and strategy, business intelligence, and e-business. He served as the founding president of the China Association for Information Systems.