Paper Number

1597

Abstract

Scholars and practitioners increasingly emphasize the role of Enterprise Social Media (ESM) in transforming organizations. By enabling networking across boundaries, knowledge sharing and swift collaboration, it can be used as a lever for changing the shared assumptions about work: organizational culture. This study investigates how employees made sense of paradoxical organizational cultures when their company harnessed ESM to drive cultural change. Using grounded theory, we conducted a 22-month long case study of a multinational company that introduced ESM in the workplace as an enabler of a culture change. We uncovered the paradoxes that impeded the hoped-for cultural change. In this Research-In-Progress, we show the details associated with one of the three key paradoxes that emerged from our findings that is flattening the organization while maintaining the hierarchy.

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