The primary goal for this essay is to discuss about the impacts of social media to the organizational culture in this modern business environment.
The reasons to conduct this essay are firstly, the diffusion of social media have been focused specifically in relationship for organizations and the stakeholders. Secondly, the business organizations have been involving themselves to social media, for example, building its own community to their customers through Facebook and Twitter. Lastly, there are rare of proper evidences to prove the functionality and its limitation about social media to organizational culture. Therefore, in order to examine the topic comprehensively, certain relevant materials from journals, books, news and organizations’ web-site had been referred.
To make the readers to understand more in this essay, the purpose to identify the meaning of culture is needed. According to Kendall (2010, p.44), she defined that ‘culture is the knowledge, language, values, customs, and material objects that are passed from person to person and from one generation to the next in a human group or society’. Simply put, culture is existed in our lives which play an inevitable role to enable the human being to communicate, interact and survive among people. Then, how about the culture within the organization? Is the organizational culture sharing similarities as Kendall’s definition? There are no doubts that every single organization has its own culture. Based on Keyton (2005, p.1) the organizational culture is referred as ‘the set of artifacts, values, and assumptions that emerge from the interactions of organizational members’. Moreover, Legge (2005) also declared that organizational culture in the view of organic analogy had been defined as the functionally to human needs, by giving employees a sense of identity and direction along with an effective method which stable the interaction. From above, this can be identified that the ‘interaction’ is the key terms which shared by such definitions. Yet, will the organizational culture, especially the ‘interaction’, change its pattern by other factors?
Indeed, not only the organization itself but its culture also had been transformed in this business world from time to time due to the globalization factor and the adoption of new technology (Kabasakal, Asugnab and Develioglu, 2006; Mills, 2010; Schein, 2010). Specially, through the emergence of technology in first generation of World Wide Web to the second generation (aka ‘Web 2.0’), the rapid development of social networking sites or social media and the Internet-based electronic commerce (aka ‘e-commerce’) had been changed the communication medium of an organization from traditional face to face style to the computer mediated communication style (Canessa and Riolo, 2003; Kabasakal et al., 2006; Harrison and Thomas, 2009; Mills, 2010). Such communication pattern not merely changes from the organization internally, but also externally, usually refers...
