Abstract
Web 2.0 technologies have progressively transformed social interactions among people. In addition, there is plenty of evidence of a positive influence of social relationships on work-related attitudes and behaviors. Within these frameworks, the purpose is to evaluate the effect of using online social networks on the workers' attitudes and behaviors, particularly in the context of higher education. The authors used an online survey to evaluate the attitudes and behavior of 157 faculty members. To assess the use of OSNs, they used a dichotomous variable. The t-student test and the PLS method were used to analyze the data. They conclude that the use of OSNs influences the workers' performance, but not job satisfaction, organizational commitment, or organizational citizenship behaviors (extra-role performance). The relationships they propose in what concerns the workers' attitudes are all empirically supported. Lastly, they describe the study limitations and we suggest some perspectives for future research.
TopThe Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is used to describe applications that distinguish themselves from preceding generations of software by a number of principles (Ullrich et al., 2008). The appearance of Web 2.0 technologies has created new opportunities for producing and sharing content and interacting with others. Also called ‘social media’, Web 2.0 includes tools that permit individual and collective publishing, sharing of images, audio and video; and the creation and maintenance of OSN (Bennett, Bishop, Dalgarno, Waycott & Kennedy, 2012).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social Networks: They function as communication channels and allow the exchange of resources to several levels, as a form of spreading and sharing ideas. The social relationships established at work are an important tool for the understanding of the workers’ outcomes in the organizations.
Behavior: It is the activity of an organism interacting with its environment.
Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: Characterized as extra-role behaviors, that is, behaviors that arise as a way of acting beyond what is defined by work requirements (in-role behaviors), which means that the workers do non-mandatory tasks without expecting any rewards or recognition.
Organizational Commitment: It is a force of connection—a psychological or attitude stage—with the goals and values of the organization, which determines a direction at the level of the individual’s behavior towards the employer organization, with the aim of benefiting it.
Online Social Networks: They function as communication interfaces between millions of users, providing an efficient and user-friendly way to maintain social connections and to easily create and share information.
Job Satisfaction: A positive emotional state—feelings and affective responses—or a generalized positive attitude towards work and the experiences that occur in the work environment, that depends on situational factors and/or on personality and personal factors, and that can be measured according to a global approach—based on the attitude towards work in general, not being a result of the sum of different aspects related to work, but depending on them—or to a multidimensional approach—satisfaction that reverses from a number of factors associated with work, being possible to measure satisfaction for each one of them.
Attitude: Describes an internal arrangement of the individual in relation to an element of the social world, which guides the conduct they adopt in the presence, real or symbolic, of that element.
Higher Education Institutions: Community service providers, specifically of transference and economic value increase of the scientific and technological knowledge, which have as main goals to facilitate environments in which people collaborate to create, share, and advance knowledge.