Date of Award

5-2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Legacy Department

Applied Psychology

Committee Chair/Advisor

Pury, Cynthia

Committee Member

Kowalski , Robin

Committee Member

Rosopa , Patrick

Committee Member

Taylor , Mary

Abstract

How are social networking sites, such as Facebook, affecting employees and their organizations? Social media provide a way of creating communities where employees can share their workplace experiences and insights. The literature suggests that the manner in which these communications occur is dependent on the organizational climate, specifically the organization's values of knowledge sharing and social communications. Based on findings in the preliminary study, the main study of this thesis investigates how an employee's level of organizational commitment and job involvement influence their use of social media. Correlational analyses showed that an employee's level of organizational commitment and job involvement are positively related to whether they use Facebook to talk about work. The organizational climate of rule bending was positively related to work-related Facebook use. An employee's perceptions of appropriateness of using Facebook to talk about work did not significantly moderate the expected relationships except for organizational commitment predicting work-related Facebook postings, in which the interaction is significant only at high levels of organizational commitment. Finally, the main hypothesis, that organizational commitment and job involvement would interact in their prediction of Facebook use was not supported but had significant simple slopes at low, medium, and high levels of job involvement.

Included in

Psychology Commons

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