Information sharing in the era of social media

Abstract

Social media has become ubiquitous in just a few years. Their success depends on users’ willingness to continue investing their time and attention in this media and share their knowledge with each other in the absence of formal contract. This thesis attempts to examine social media users’ information sharing activities with three essays. Specifically, this thesis investigates 1 Why do social networking sites (SNS) users have online information privacy? 2 What are the antecedents of blog users’ online information privacy concerns? and 3 Why virtual team members want to sharing knowledge among each other in social media platform? To answer these questions, we conducted three studies. Specifically, in study 1, we integrated value-based and cognate-based perspective together to explain the emergence of SNSs users’ privacy concerns in a more comprehensive way. Drawing on the psychological ownership theory, we found that people have online privacy concerns in the context of SNSs once they can develop a feeling of psychological ownership toward the virtual properties on the platform. We also identified and tested an empirical model with three routes that can help people to develop their psychological ownerships and therefore lead to privacy concerns on SNSs. In study 2, we presented a multi-faceted model to investigate the factors that can influence the information privacy concerns of bloggers. We found that, previous privacy experience appeared to significantly influence the information privacy concerns of bloggers positively. The website privacy statement was found not to significantly affect the information privacy concerns of bloggers. Finally, the results show that the perceived strength of social ties between bloggers and their readers significantly influences the information privacy concerns of bloggers. In study 3, consistent with previous studies in offline context, we proved that teamwork quality can also influence a virtual team’s performance. Further, we identified two moderators, leadermember exchange and perceived organization support, for the relationship between teamwork quality and team and individual’s success.