Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore social media’s impact on organizational knowledge quality through the theoretical lens of social capital and resource exchange. Design/methodology/approach – This is a theory-confirming, quantitative study using panel data collected through a Web-based survey. Findings – The results show that while social media affects structural capital and cognitive capital directly, it only affects relational capital indirectly through structural and cognitive capital. Moreover, overall social media and the enhanced social capital do help promote organizational efforts in knowledge management, which subsequently leads to a higher level of organizational knowledge quality. Research limitations/implications – All survey respondents were from the USA, which may limit the generalizability of the findings. The authors also call for more research in establishing the time sequence in the proposed causal relations and in the individual-level mechanism through which social media promotes organizational knowledge quality. Practical implications – This study highlights both the potential and limitations of social media in promoting organizational knowledge management. Businesses must consciously manage the assimilation and use of social media to benefit from them. Originality/value – The authors position the study at the intersection of social media, social capital and knowledge management and explicate how social media work through social capital and organizational knowledge management efforts to affect knowledge quality.

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Firms are increasingly employing social media to manage relationships with partner organizations, yet the role of institutional pressures in social media assimilation has not been studied. We investigate social media assimilation in firms using a model that combines the two theoretical streams of IT adoption: organizational innovation and institutional theory. The study uses a composite view of absorptive capacity that includes both previous experience with similar technology and the general ability to learn and exploit new technologies. We find that institutional pressures are an important antecedent to absorptive capacity, an important measure of organizational learning capability. The paper augments theory in finding the role and limits of institutional pressures. Institutional pressures are found to have no direct effect on social media assimilation but to impact absorptive capacity, which mediates its influence on assimilation.

Abstract:We investigate antecedents and contingencies of location configurations supporting global delivery models (GDMs) in global outsourcing. GDMs are a new form of IT-enabled client-specific investment promoting services provision integration with clients by exploiting client proximity and time-zone spread allowing for 24/7 service delivery and access to resources. Based on comprehensive data we show that providers are likely to establish GDM configurations when clients value access to globally distributed talent pools and speed of service delivery, and in particular when services are highly commoditized.Findings imply that coordination across time zones increasingly affects international operations in business-to-business and born-global industries.