Strategic Social Media Use in Public Relations: Professionals’ Perceived Social Media Impact, Leadership Behaviors, and Work-Life Conflict

ABSTRACT

Using the E-leadership theory as the conceptual framework, the study examined strategic communicators’ perceptions of the impact of social media use on their work, leadership behaviors, and work-life conflict. Through a national sample of communication professionals (N = 458), this study revealed the following key findings. The use of YouTube in professionals’ work, social media use in media relations, employee communications, and cause-related marketing/social marketing were significantly, positively associated with participants’ perceptions of the enhancing impact of social media use. Social media use in crisis management and employee communications significantly, positively predicted professionals’ perceptions of social media’s aggravating impact (e.g., extended work hours, increased workload) on their work. The use of Facebook and YouTube in strategic communication, the use of social media in environmental scanning, as well as the positive and negative impact of social media use all significantly and positively predicted communication professionals’ leadership behaviors. When the unintended negative effects of social media use happened, professionals perceived a low control over their work and thereby experienced a high level of time-based and strain-based work-life conflict. Finally, public affairs/governmental relations professionals who were frequent users of social media for their work reported a high level of strain-based work-life conflict.

Notes

¹ Through their strategic use of social media, strategic communicators receive information, energy or matter from the environment (input), analyze the information, energy or matter and respond to the input (throughput), release information, energy or matter into the environment to restore equilibrium or solve problems (output), and seek response from the environment to determine whether an equilibrium has been accomplished or a problem is solved (feedback).

² Economic Capital: Financial, physical and manufactured capital resources. Social Capital: The ability of a strategic communicator or an organization to capitalize on social connections. Symbolic Capital: The amount of honor or prestige possessed within a given social structure. Human Capital: Skills, knowledge and abilities that a strategic communicator can use to generate income or other useful outputs. Organizational Capital: Institutionalized knowledge stored in databases, routines, patents, manuals and structures (see Mandviwalla & Watson, 2014, p. 98).

³ For this project, the researchers used the following 9 databases: (1) The Fortune 500 list of large corporations, (2) INC Magazine’s list of the fastest growing private companies, (3) Deloitte Fast 500 list of the fastest growing technology companies, (4) CharityNavigator.com’s directory of large charities, (5) Guidestar.org list of the largest nonprofit organizations, (6) US News & World Report’s list of major universities and colleges, (7) Becker Hospital Review’s list of large hospitals, (8) American School & University magazine’s list of the largest school systems, and (9) Washington Technology Magazine’s list of the top companies that do business with the federal government.

⁴ See Table 1 for the complete participant profile.

⁵ (n_{fewer than 100 employees} = 68, 15.1%; n_{100-499 employees} = 72, 16.0%; n_{500-999 employees} = 51, 11.3%; n_{1,000–2,499 employees} = 50, 11.1%; n₂,_{500–4,999 employees} = 58, 12.9%; n_{5,000–9,999 employees} = 43, 9.5%; n_{10,000–24,999 employees} = 51, 11.3%; n_{25,000–49,999 employees} = 23, 5.1%; n_{50,000 or more employees} = 22, 4.9%).

⁶ The items were also used in PRSA’s Work, Life, and Gender (WLG) Committee’s PRSA membership survey.

⁷ When hierarchical regression analyses were conducted, the authors controlled the following demographic variables (see Table 1): Age, gender, educational background, college major, Hispanic, Latio and Spanish origin, race, salary level, professional experience, organization type, total number of employees, total number of communication management staff, and total number of subordinates. However, the impact of these variables was not reported in the main text, for the sake of brevity.