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Internal social media (ISM) make it possible for all employees to participate in knowledge sharing and decision-making and to voice their opinions. However, several studies have found that organizations are far from unlocking the full potential of ISM. This paper seeks to explore and explain this gap further by adopting a sensemaking lens to managers' understanding of a social intranet in a public sector organization.

A longitudinal case study of the process of introducing ISM was conducted in a Danish municipality. Before, during and after the launch of the intranet, interviews with department heads and communication managers in the six different municipal departments were carried out to explore how they made sense of the purpose of ISM.

Findings indicate that during the process of introducing and implementing ISM, department heads' and managers' narratives about the purpose of the intranet changed from being a matter of involving, engaging and hearing the voices of the employees to being an effective administrative tool and a channel for management to reach all employees.

Rather than the traditional focus on whether ISM fail or succeed, the paper offers new understandings of how managers' sensemaking of ISM changes over time, leading to changes in the actual usage of and communication on ISM.

The paper aims to highlight the role of enterprise social media as an internal workplace tool for employee engagement purposes.

The paper provides a viewpoint on how social media can be used internally by organizations after considering both academic and practitioner literature in the respective field.

The paper posits that organizations should move beyond using social networking tools for recruitment and branding purposes and take a step further to use social media tools internally for employee engagement initiatives. It provides practical implications for managers to embrace social media as an engagement tool and to increase employees’ participation on such media.

The paper provides implications for both researchers and practitioners for using social media as a strategic employee engagement initiative and devising appropriate social media and human resource strategies to do so.

The paper offers insights into how enterprise social media can be used as an internal communication tool for engaging employees in this technologically connected era.

The purpose of this study is to show that an important antecedent of perceived knowledge quality is an employee’s position in the organizational network due to their participation in different interest groups. In particular, this study theorizes that brokers establish a network of groups, which increases perceived knowledge quality vis-a-vis the social capital that employees draw on.

To test this study’s hypotheses on the influence of the structural position of knowledge brokers on the positive effects of social capital on perceived knowledge quality, this study combines data from an online survey with longitudinal archival data from a youth-care organization who used an enterprise social network (ESN) for knowledge sharing.

This study found a mitigating effect of being a broker on the relationship between trust and perceived knowledge quality, and also between inter-team interaction and perceived knowledge quality for lower levels of both trust and inter-team interaction on perceived knowledge quality.

Although the hypotheses are supported, in light of prior research, the authors would have expected stronger and positive effects.

This research is particularly interesting because it emphasizes the important role of social capital. For organizations that deal with trust issues, it might help to stimulate employees to broaden their activity on ESNs by becoming active in multiple groups.

While knowledge sharing on ESNs is generally conducive for creating organizational value, there is a lack of understanding of what drives employees’ perception of the quality of shared knowledge, and how this perception may depend on their position in the social network. To investigate this question, the authors turn to social capital theory.

The study aims to understand enterprise social media usage at work and explore its impact on employee outcomes, particularly learning behaviors. The scope of the paper is limited to organizationally facilitated enterprise social media (ESM) used internally for workplace communication and draws upon ESM affordances highlighted by the theory of communication visibility.

The study used a qualitative research design based on Miles and Huberman framework (1994) as the research question was exploratory in nature. Thematic analysis was conducted using QSR-NVivo to arrive at the dominant themes and to understand their relationship between enterprise social media use at work. Each emergent theme was generated from the behavioral indicators labelled as nodes. Drawing on qualitative data, the study explored the lived-in experiences of employees using enterprise social media for workplace interactions.

The thematic analysis using QSR-NVivo provided qualitative evidence for the phenomenon of enterprise social media use in the form of four emergent themes: patterns of enterprise social media usage by employees, employees' informal learning behaviors, employee social capital and organizational learning capability.

The study provides theoretical insights into the lived-in experiences of employees using ESM at work and unravel thematic behavioral impact on their learning, social capital and organizational learning capability. The findings of this study support recent research work on impact of ESM on knowledge sharing behaviors (see Sun et al., 2019) and other significant work on co-creation of knowledge (see Wagner et al., 2014). Thus, adding to the body of knowledge management literature.

This study provides evidence for the role of enterprise social media in developing organizational learning capability by offering support and platform for employees' informal learning and building their social capital. Thus, organizations should leverage enterprise social media not only a social networking tool but more as a strategic learning resource. Hence, organizational leaders must encourage employees to be involved on such platforms in order to promote their informal learning. Also, this study captures the role of employee social capital in explaining the enterprise social media, informal learning and organizational learning capability relationship. This shows that enterprise social media can help employees to learn informally when they have good relationships. Hence, this study provides implications for both HR and IT managers and consultants who plan to implement technology for collaborative purposes, should not undermine the importance of building employee social capital. Only then can they utilize the potential of ESM as a learning tool. Last, this research may also influence the general attitude towards social media use at work and further impact the design and implementation of organizational social media policies.

The paper is novel as the qualitative investigation offers deeper insights into the impact of ESM usage on employee and organizational learning behaviors. The paper draws on theoretical underpinnings to present useful linkages between emergent concepts and makes valuable contribution to the literature on enterprise social media use and learning at work.

This paper aims to examine if (and how), enterprise social media (ESM) can be understood as a strategic knowledge management phenomenon to improve organizational performance.

This paper uses intellectual capital theory and its functional building blocks to organize different types of the ESM platforms, based on secondary data. It then connects these findings to the underling intellectual capital tenets to introduce a conceptual model that explicates how ESM impacts strategic knowledge management, and vice versa.

This paper concludes that ESM provides a unique complement to traditional strategic knowledge management. The authors argue that ESM differs substantially from other contexts in which intellectual capital has been applied, and extend intellectual capital with three appropriate dimensions (human, social and structural capital). Given the potentially disruptive nature of ESM, this framework helps firms understand the nature of the changes that are needed.

The paper provides the first review of the business needs that are served by the software functions and management processes under the ESM banner. This original contribution takes the intellectual capital and strategic knowledge management discussions from their usual high levels of abstraction and relates them to the real world of ESM, focusing on outcomes. Its unique “Intellectual Capital Framework for the Socially Oriented Enterprise” includes distinct, testable propositions that provide a practical approach to strategically planning, implementing and optimizing ESM.

This article explores how employees in a public sector organization (PSO) make sense of the introduction of a social intranet and new employee communication roles. The aim is to understand employee sensemaking and how sensemaking influences the change process within the organization.

The article is based on a case study in a Danish PSO with 30,000 employees. The empirical material includes strategic documents, online observations and seven focus groups with employees conducted before, during and after the introduction of a new social intranet.

The employees found that making sense of the purpose with the social intranet is difficult. A managerial approach to change communication could easily result in employees' frustrations and concerns being dismissed as signs of resistance to change. From a communication perspective, the findings reveal that the employees engaged in seven different sensemaking enactments.

Change cannot be understood simply as something that employees are for or against. Instead, a change process should be perceived as a set of communication processes or sensemaking enactments happening in interactions between employees that can act in favor of, against or neutrally toward change.

Managers and communication professionals can interact with the seven sensemaking enactments, and some tentative initiatives are suggested in the article.

The article explores the employee perspective in a change process in a PSO and identifies seven employee sensemaking enactments highlighting that change happens in communication processes.

As new work environments have been created and accelerated due to technological advances, after-hours work communication has become one of the prominent features of the technology-enabled work environment. Grounded in the conservation of resources theory, this study aims to uncover the effects of after-hours work communication through communication technologies on employees' burnout and extra-role behaviors.

The study conducted an online survey of 315 US full-time employees from a wide range of industrial sectors.

The findings of the study show that after-hours work communication through communication technologies increases employees' negative extra-role behaviors, specifically counterproductive work behavior and negative word-of-mouth. Furthermore, emotional exhaustion partially mediated the relationship between after-hours work communication and negative extra-role behaviors.

The study provides practical implications for an organization's effective optimization of work-related communication to overcome adverse consequences for employees and organizations. Corporate leaders and communication professionals are encouraged to establish clear guidelines related to the use of communication technologies after hours and exercise leadership practices to prevent after-hours communication through communication technologies from contributing to employees' burnout.

The findings enhance the understanding of the role of after-hours work communication through communication technologies in the workplace by revealing how the effects of after-hours work communication enabled by communication technologies on employees' psychological well-being spills over to organizational effectiveness.

This paper aims to focus on the effect of intranet‐based social networking services (SNS) on the activity of the firm, in particular on the change in the number of business connections and on the time and cost‐savings brought about by such SNS.

The authors hypothesize that the use of intranet‐based SNS positively influences “social network productivity” defined as the relationship between interconnectedness and knowledge performance, whereby an increase in the number of business contacts may result in a shortened and less costly retrieval of work‐relevant knowledge. Drawing on a large sample of Japanese respondents, a taxonomy based on levels of organizational social capital and innovativeness was used to assess the moderating effects of social capital and innovativeness on social network productivity.

SNS were found to mildly improve efficiency in accessing knowledge or in increasing the number of business contacts. More importantly, this study reveals that in using intranet‐based SNS, companies with both higher social capital and innovativeness displayed higher social network productivity.

The use of SNS was treated implicitly and should therefore be measured independently, and detailed data on the respondents' organizations would be useful to reveal organizational clusters.

Because fostering social capital and innovativeness rests largely on the firm's organizational culture, leaders who want to implement SNS effectively should pay special attention to the culture of their organization.

In the use of business SNS, practitioners need to consider particular organizational characteristics that may affect the effectiveness of intranet‐based SNS.

The article considers the relationship between effective knowledge creation, acquisition and management and the user interface. The need for and problems associated with knowledge management are discussed and a useful model for organisational learning development is proposed (IPRAM). The article makes a detailed consideration of interface issues in relation to knowledge management and their role in synergising the personal‐corporate knowledge nexus for organisational and economic benefit. Alternative customisable representations of intranets are presented with their implications discussed. Network models, metaphors and iconic interfaces all have their merits. Besides improving interface representations of the intranet researchers need to consider how conceptual and experiential knowledge can be captured in the intranet.

Reports preliminary results from an ethnographic study of a consultative process in an Australian university during 1997. By providing a “virtual discussion forum” an organisational support system (OSS), based on e‐mail and Intranet, was expected to enable equal participation in the consultative process, freedom of expression (“everybody will have their say and will be heard”) and to contribute to more participative and consensus‐based decision making. The analysis of data collected (messages, documents, interviews, notes) suggests that the OSS was not used uniformly across the institution by departments, groups and individuals. Different modes of use of the OSS identified related to contextual features, such as democratic versus authoritarian management traditions, the sharing of power versus authority of power, the culture of consultation versus obedience to superiors. It was found that these contextual features conditioned the modes of use and consequently the role OSS played in the process. On the other hand, it was observed how, in the course of the process, the OSS affected these contextual factors themselves.