Influence of computer mediated communication on social capital: A disaggregated approach

In a knowledge driven firm, who you know and how they can help you has become as important as what you know. This realization has brought social interactions to the center of organizational studies. These social interactions are now being increasingly shaped by computer mediated communication (CMC). Two recent trends make investigation of the effects of CMC on social interactions relevant. First, Generation Y, which grew up with the Internet, will dominate the demographics of the organizations in the future. Second, the rise of social networking tools in the organizations.;To investigate these issues, one conceptual and two empirical studies were conducted. Study 1 conceptualizes the impact of CMC on social interactions. Its central argument is: social capital is built on the foundation of social interactions; its development and maintenance relies on communications that are increasingly supported by CMC.;Study 2 is empirical. This study attempts to address the past disparate results about the effects of the Internet on the number of social ties by incorporating various types of Internet usage instead of traditional net use measure. The results indicate entertainment use of the Internet results in isolation irrespective of context investigated in this Study. Higher entertainment use led to less ties and low centrality. In contrast, socializing use of Internet led to more ties and high centrality in close friendship neworks. Finally, learning use of Internet led to more ties and centrality in advice networks.;Study 3 is an emperical study in an organization setting which investigates the importance of CMC-based and face to face ties in the context of knowledge sharing. The results indicate that CMC based ties are more diverse than face to face ties and are more associated with competence based trust. The CMC based strong ties are most significantly associated with knowedge sharing because CMC-based strong ties possess the required trust as well as the unique information to share with the focal individual. Once CMC ties are taken into account, the addition of face to face ties adds little predictive ability, explaining less than 1% variance over and above what is already explained by CMC based ties.;Key words. Computer Mediated Communications, Knowledge Sharing, Social Networking Sites, Social Networks, Social Interactions, Social Capital...