In Blogs We Trust: Their Nature and Nurture in Organizations November 29, 2005 Dan Smith Communication 692

New Medium, New Message The medium is the message, after McLuhan “Participatory media” (Blood, 2004) Arguably a new medium The essential elements are social, not technical; Not always a good process Hypothesis: Organizational climate and trust significantly affect adoption and use of blogs

Objectives Gather systematic data on the extent and purposes of blogging – or not – in firms Assess the impact of organizational climate on blogging in firms, and vice versa Assess the impact of trust, in its multiple forms, on blogging, and vice versa Assess the impact of communication patterns on blogging, and vice versa

Organizational Climate The concrete expression of organizational culture Multi-dimensional Some examples: Fairness, Affiliation. Innovativeness, Attitude toward knowledge sharing, Anticipated reciprocal relationships, Subjective norm – on sharing

Trust Multi-dimensional and can cross levels of analysis. Involves risk Fukuyama (1995): “... the expectation that arises within a community of regular, honest and cooperative behavior based on commonly shared norms on the part of members of the community”

Trust Fukuyama considers trust more important than financial or physical capital. Allows delegation and interdependence Trust has recently grown in research importance due to the Web and e- commerce.

Mayer, Davis & Schoorman, (1995) Model

Limitations of Mayer, Davis & Schoorman, (1995) Model Dyadic model Serva, Fuller & Mayer (2005) conducted a field experiment and demonstrated an effect for reciprocal trust among interacting teams. In doing so the extended the theoretical model of Mayer, Davis & Schoorman (1995)

The Many Faces of Trust Following McKnight & Chervany (2002): Dispositional trust from Psychology & Economics (General trust in others) Institutional Trust from Sociology (Trust in the situation or structures/organization) Interpersonal Trust from Social Psychology (Trust in specific others, e.g. bloggers?)

Extension and Replication We extend the model to include organizational climate We replicate and extend by adding blogging behaviors Patterson, et al. (2005) have a multi- dimensional validated climate measure linked to productivity, etc. but it lacks a trust dimension

Basic Research Model General Organizational climate dimensions including trust and communication Blogging behavior at T1 Blogging environment of the organization Blogging behavior at T2 Knowledge sharing attitudes & behavior Individual trust characteristics Organizational Climate including trust and communication Individual trust characteristics including trust Blogging environment (Direct associations) T1 T2

Organization(s) to be Researched Despite the hype, blogs not widely used in intranets (Cayzer, 2004) Businesses of varying sizes and industries of great interest School systems would be a revealing area

Data Collection Most blog research has been rich but based on interviews Need more systematic survey of organizational (1) policies, (2) expectations of management, (3) employee attitudes and behaviors Longitudinal study: T 1 and T 2 About 9 months between surveys

Data Analysis Descriptive statistics (Re)Confirmatory factor analysis Content analysis of the few open ended questions on the surveys and formal company policies Multiple regression Time-lagged correlation Structural Equation Modeling

Anticipated Contributions There is a lot of information on personal blogging but less on inside firms. Plan to add valid statistics Gain theoretical insights on the impact of blogs on desirable social behaviors, particularly trust and organizational climate Contribute to practice