The Role of Social Media for Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration in Distributed Teams

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Social media are providing a medium through which individuals are reshaping how they do many things – finding romantic partners, providing social support, grieving for loved ones, even buying mundane items like toothpaste. They are also reshaping organizations – the way they function, the relationships they contain, and the ways organizations interact with external stakeholders. In this paper, we consider the changes that social media have introduced to organizational knowledge-sharing practices. We believe the social and technical affordances of social media create new challenges for organizations and necessitate research examining the ways in which: (1) technological affordances impact knowledge sharing within and between teams, (2) interpersonal and relationship development processes shape knowledge sharing among distributed team members and their individual social networks, and (3) organizational social networks influence knowledge sharing among distributed team members.