Social Media, Knowledge Sharing, and Innovation: Toward a Theory of Communication Visibility

TLDR

The emerging theory suggests that making invisible organizational communication visible to third parties can improve their metaknowledge of who knows what and who knows whom. This study develops a theory of communication visibility from a field study of an enterprise social networking site in a large financial services organization and discusses its implications for the knowledge economy, proposing that enhanced metaknowledge can spur innovation and reduce duplication. The enterprise social networking site creates communication visibility through message transparency and network translucence, enabling third parties to infer coworkers’ knowledge and their communication partners. Enhanced metaknowledge allows workers to recombine ideas more effectively, avoid duplication, and proactively aggregate information, thereby fostering innovation and reducing redundant work.

Abstract

This paper offers a theory of communication visibility based on a field study of the implementation of a new enterprise social networking site in a large financial services organization. The emerging theory suggests that once invisible communication occurring between others in the organization becomes visible for third parties, those third parties could improve their metaknowledge (i.e., knowledge of who knows what and who knows whom). Communication visibility, in this case made possible by the enterprise social networking site, leads to enhanced awareness of who knows what and whom through two interrelated mechanisms: message transparency and network translucence. Seeing the contents of other’s messages helps third-party observers make inferences about coworkers' knowledge. Tangentially, seeing the structure of coworkers' communication networks helps third-party observers make inferences about those with whom coworkers regularly communicate. The emerging theory further suggests that enhanced metaknowledge can lead to more innovative products and services and less knowledge duplication if employees learn to work in new ways. By learning vicariously rather than through experience, workers can more effectively recombine existing ideas into new ideas and avoid duplicating work. Moreover, they can begin to proactively aggregate information perceived daily rather than engaging in reactive search after confronting a problem. I discuss the important implications of this emerging theory of communication visibility for work in the knowledge economy.