Use of social media at work: a new form of employee voice?

Abstract

Social media such as Twitter and Facebook have become some of the most powerful communication tools both inside and outside of the workplace. While much of the focus has been on the potential negative and destructive (‘dark’) consequences of social media at work, less attention has been given to the harnessing of social media in a constructive (‘smart’) way to enhance human resource management (HRM). In the context of this special issue on technology and HRM, this paper takes an exploratory approach to examine the relationships between social media use and job satisfaction using data from the Australian Electronic Workplace Survey. We find that the level of job satisfaction is a factor in the desire to use social media to voice concerns related to work, but this effect is only found for Generation Y employees. However, we find social media is not commonly used to voice concerns related to work and this suggests that it is an untapped resource which could provide management with an immediate or ‘real’-time understanding of workplace issues.

Keywords:

• employee voice
• Generation Y
• Human resource management (HRM)
• job satisfaction
• social media
• wisdom of crowds