Social Media Etiquette in the Workplace

How do people around the world combine their work and personal life when it comes to social media? That is what two NYIT School of Management faculty members are going to find out in a four-year research study.

Associate Professor Deborah Y. Cohn, Ph.D., and Assistant Professor Joshua E. Bienstock, J.D., received a $100,000 grant to investigate work relationships and social media in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), China, Israel, and Canada. (The Albert and Pearl Ginsberg Foundation and the Mallah Family Foundation will support the research with grants of $75,000 and $25,000, respectively.)

Cohn and Bienstock used social psychologist Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory as a starting point for their study. The theory scores national cultures on six dimensions and is used to analyze cultural values. For the purposes of their research, Cohn and Bienstock focused on three of those dimensions: Power Distance, the cultural acceptance of unequal power relations versus people who question authority; Individuality, the value culture places on either individual preference or collective needs; and Uncertainty Avoidance, a cultural value that favors certainty and a single truth, as opposed to ambiguity and diversity of opinion.

“Business professionals in these four nations also mingle their work and personal lives on various social media platforms,” said Cohn. “We want to compare and contrast complications that may result in the various situations and locales.”

For example, in countries like the U.A.E., which scores high in acceptance of unequal power distribution, they expect to find that people will want to keep their work and personal lives very separate.

In a similar U.S.-based research project, Cohn and Bienstock were able to identify the different ways people use social media and apply those findings to their current study. Some people they discovered are “segmenters.” In other words, these are people who like to keep everything separate, and go to great lengths to keep their work lives separate from their personal lives. “However, they tend to get very anxious when there’s a break in the dam and someone from work tries to friend them on Facebook. Or what is happening a lot now is that managers will ask employees to like the company’s Facebook page or to send out tweets about the brand,” explained Cohn.

Then there are those who aren’t trying to keep their work and personal lives separate. Termed “integrators,” they are the type of people who are friends with everyone at work and are connected with them on their social media accounts.

“What we are looking for is to see how social media impacts relationships for people at work,” explained Cohn. “We understand that there’s some social media that’s mostly personal, and some social media that’s considered work-related, like Facebook versus LinkedIn, but there are people who are on Facebook with the people they work with. What kind of impact does that have on their relationships at work?”

What Cohn believes this research will show is that there are differences in culture that have an impact on social media and what it means to different people in different cultures.

“We’re looking to see if these research findings are going to be similar to people who are really embedded in different cultures that may approach friendships and workplace relationships differently,” Cohn explained.

Ultimately, this study will have a big impact on businesses in order to help them be more productive, as well as to help improve employee relationships.