Social media creates opportunities for organizational improvement in general and in functions such as marketing. Cultural attributes of employees also affect the ways in which communication channels are used and, therefore, affect organizational goals and decision-making. We empirically investigate the effect of employee cultural dimensions on social media use and its implications for organizations in general and in functions such as marketing. This is likely to be the first study to connect cultural dimensions to social media use.
We use survey data and statistical analysis to investigate the moderating effect of cultural dimensions on productivity through the use of social media and face-to-face communications. The social media platforms analyzed in our study are Facebook and a general category denoted as “Other Social Media” to capture excluded platforms and enterprise-specific social media. The cultural dimensions analyzed are power distance (PD), uncertainty avoidance (UA) and individualism-collectivism (IC). We use arguments derived from prior literature on social media use and cultural dimensions to develop our hypotheses.
Not surprisingly, face-to-face communication is strongly associated with productivity and this result is in consonance with intuition. However, Facebook is negatively associated with productivity, whereas other social media is positively associated with productivity. However, when we introduce Hofstede's cultural dimensions as a moderator, the negative effect of Facebook on productivity is amplified for employees with high UA.
Our research findings are (1) limited by the demographic constraints of the survey data, (2) limited to Hofstede's cultural dimensions and (3) that the data is self-reported from the surveys. Implications are that any generalizations may need to take these limitations into consideration. However, these limitations provide an opportunity for other scholars to expand on this work and mitigate some of these limitations.
Firms can develop marketing and communications strategies that improve productivity and marketing success through understanding the role of cultural attributes on the effectiveness of social media platforms. Organizations should not rely exclusively on social media platforms and may have to fall back on the traditional tried-and-true mode of face-to-face communication. Firms can benefit from constraining the use of platforms such as Facebook that drain productivity, particularly when high UA is a prevalent cultural trait. Our findings from the other social media category suggest that firms can enhance productivity by having an enterprise-oriented social media platform.
Implications across the globe are: (1) the need to recognize and understand the effect of social media usage on productivity, (2) the simultaneous need to understand the cultural attributes of employees, which have implications for global and country-wide strategies and (3) the need to take proactive steps to improve workplace productivity after accounting for cultural differences. Physical meetings may need to be complemented by other digital forms of communication. Instead of relying on serendipity, firms could institute formal policies for periodic face-to-face meetings. In the context of global teams, the frequency and nature of such meetings have to be considered.
To the best of our knowledge, such a study has not been undertaken previously. This would be the first such study to connect cultural dimension characteristics of individuals to social media usage and traditional face-to-face communications to organizational outcomes such as productivity.
