User Resistance to Social Media within Organizations

Abstract: Web 2.0, popularly known as social media is gaining attention from organizations as a tool for capturing the tacit knowledge of employees. Social media has been highly successful in the internet which has gained it this attention. However, organizations, which employ social media inside have faced many hurdles to making them a success in meeting their goals. This does not mean that social media is not relevant or useful for organizations; just that its success/failure needs to be studied more and strategies employed to help them succeed. While there is a lot of talk about social media, there is little research into its use and success. The idea of user resistance to social media itself is a concept we have introduced for the purpose of understanding the reasons behind the failure of social media within organizations. In order to theoretically base our study, we have drawn from the extensive literature on user resistance to information systems. Social media is after all a type of information system. Nevertheless, the characteristics of social media also make it distinct in several ways. We have tried to understand both the parallels and the differences. We conducted the study in a medium size telecom company. The organization had a number of disjointed internal wikis. These were the focus of our study. The study revealed that some of the user resistance factors, like felt need, perceived usefulness, perceived costs versus benefits, perceived ease of use, system characteristics, management support and management control, that we had selected from our theoretical foundation, do contribute to user resistance to wikis. We could not get substantial evidence to support resistance to change and co-worker behaviour. We have introduced some factors like size of group and nature of tasks after the empirical findings. We were also able to gain insight to the way in which wikis were being introduced and spread, and this has helped us to create a model.