title: Social media: A contextual framework to guide research and practice.
abstract: Social media are a broad collection of digital platforms that have radically changed the way people interact and communicate. However, we argue that social media are not simply a technology but actually represent a context that differs in important ways from traditional (e.g., face-to-face) and other digital (e.g., email) ways of interacting and communicating. As a result, social media is a relatively unexamined type of context that may affect the cognition, affect, and behavior of individuals within organizations. We propose a contextual framework that identifies the discrete and ambient stimuli that distinguish social media contexts from digital communication media (e.g., email) and physical (e.g., face-to-face) contexts. We then use this contextual framework to demonstrate how it changes more person-centered theories of organizational behavior (e.g., social exchange, social contagion, and social network theories). These theoretical insights are also used to identify a number of practical implications for individuals and organizations. This study's major contribution is creating a theoretical understanding of social media features so that future research may proceed in a theory-based, rather than platform-based, manner. Overall, we intend for this article to stimulate and broadly shape the direction of research on this ubiquitous, but poorly understood, phenomenon.
authors.affiliation: Department of Management, University of South Carolina.
authors.forename: Lynn A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: McFarland
authors.affiliation: Department of Management, University of South Carolina.
authors.forename: Robert E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Ployhart
mesh_terms: D035841:Behavioral Research; D006801:Humans; D015279:Organizational Culture; D061108:Social Media; D060756:Social Networking