In contemporary knowledge-based organizations, teams often play an essential role in leveraging knowledge resources. Organizations make significant investments in information technology to support knowledge management practices in teams. At the same time, recent studies show that the transactive memory system (TMS)—the specialized division of cognitive labor among team members that relates to the encoding, storage, and retrieval of knowledge—is an important factor that affects a team’s performance. Yet little is known of how IT support for knowledge management practices in organizations affects the development of TMS. Furthermore, the precise role of TMS on knowledge sharing and knowledge application, which in turn influences team performance, has not been fully explored. In order to close this gap in the literature, we conducted a field study that involved 139 on-going teams of 743 individuals from two major firms in South Korea. Our results show that IT support in organizations has a positive impact on the development of TMS in teams, and that both TMS and IT support have a positive impact on knowledge sharing and knowledge application. Furthermore, we found that knowledge sharing has a positive impact on knowledge application, which in turn has a direct impact on team performance. However, contrary to our expectation, knowledge sharing does not have a direct impact on team performance and its impact on team performance was fully mediated by knowledge application. Our research shows that organizations can improve team members’ meta-knowledge of who knows what through the careful investment in information technology. Finally, our results show that sharing knowledge alone is not enough. Organizations must ensure that shared knowledge is in fact applied in order to improve team performance.

This manuscript reports an empirical study integrating equity and media multiplexity approaches to relational maintenance via separation of medium- and content-specific components of behaviors. Results from confirmatory factor analysis demonstrate good fit for the decomposition model. The analysis also revealed that content- and medium-specific components differentially predict the strength and quality of friends’ influence. Specifically, positivity and social networks predict control mutuality, whereas medium-specific components predict interdependence. Although face-to-face maintenance indirectly predicts control mutuality, online maintenance exhibits no such association. Results did not differ significantly between local and long-distance friends. In addition to introducing a statistical tool for separating content- and medium-specific effects, these results suggest how theoretical understandings of relational maintenance behavior can be refined.

Social media technologies have made it increasingly feasible for employees to be connected to work. WeChat, a newly emerging social media platform, is widely used in daily life, yet there is still little understanding of the consequences of the use of WeChat groups in enterprise. Based on boundary theory, we suggested that the use of WeChat groups in enterprise have both pros and cons for employees. We gathered data from an online survey of 202 employees. Results show that posting work-related content in enterprise WeChat groups had a beneficial impact on work for employees but also caused work-life conflict (WLC). However, posting life-related content in enterprise WeChat groups contributes to employees’ life-work enhancement (LWE). Contributions and future study directions of these findings are discussed.

Our research examines how knowledge professionals use mobile email devices to get their work done and the implications of such use for their autonomy to control the location, timing, and performance of work. We found that knowledge professionals using mobile email devices to manage their communication were enacting a norm of continual connectivity and accessibility that produced a number of contradictory outcomes. Although individual use of mobile email devices offered these professionals flexibility, peace of mind, and control over interactions in the short term, it also intensified collective expectations of their availability, escalating their engagement and thus reducing their ability to disconnect from work. Choosing to use their mobile email devices to work anywhere/anytime—actions they framed as evidence of their personal autonomy—the professionals were ending up using it everywhere/all the time, thus diminishing their autonomy in practice. This autonomy paradox reflected professionals’ ongoing navigation of the tension between their interests in personal autonomy on the one hand and their professional commitment to colleagues and clients on the other. We further found that this dynamic has important unintended consequences—reaffirming and challenging workers’ sense of themselves as autonomous and responsible professionals while also collectively shifting the norms of how work is and should be performed in the contemporary workplace.

The aim of this study is an exploration of the behavioural addictions to work (workaholism) and to use of technology (technolophilia), particularly as they overlap in managers' work routines and expectations placed on their employees.

Although the editors suffer moderate rates of burnout in terms of exhaustion and cynicism, they demonstrate high levels of professional effectiveness. Generally, they do not suffer high rates of burnout.

The three-component Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey was implemented to examine burnout among newspaper journalists (N = 770). With a moderate rate of exhaustion, a high rate of cynicism and a moderate rate of professional efficacy, journalists demonstrate higher rates of burnout than presented in previous work. Additionally, journalists expressing intentions to leave the profession (n = 173) demonstrated high rates of exhaustion and cynicism, and moderate rates of professional efficacy, making them ‘at-risk’ for burnout. Also, 74.5 percent of journalists 34 and younger (n = 223) either expressed intentions to leave newspaper journalism or answered ‘don’t know’. The most ‘at-risk’ to burnout appear to be young copy editors or page designers working at small newspapers.

This paper aims to investigate the shifting boundaries between two experiential categories – home and work – for office workers. The boundaries are both spatial and temporal, and the paper seeks to analyse how certain kinds of mobile technology are being used in such a way as to make these boundaries increasingly permeable.

Assumptions about the pace of life speeding up abound in contemporary social theory. While many factors are contributing to this phenomenon, information and communication technologies are seen as the main drivers. This article considers the way social theorists analyse the concepts of time and speed and then examines how these claims might be assessed in the light of empirical research. Such research shows that time compression has multiple dimensions, and that the effect of digital devices like the mobile phone is not simply one of acceleration. In particular, I suggest that the social studies of technology offers a richer analysis of the reciprocal relationship between technological innovation and changing time practices. My argument is that while the hitherto neglected temporal dimension in sociological theory is now being addressed, there is an urgent need for increased dialogue to connect social theory with detailed empirical studies. Without this, we will continue to have difficulty distinguishing social science from science fiction.