Effects of social media on organizational behavior in non-democratic countries

Abstract

Many researchers (e.g., Johns, 2014; Parveen, Jaafar & Ainin, 2014; Razmerita, Kirchner & Nabeth, 2014) have suggested the use of social media in companies has several and different positive effects on the behaviors of managers and employees however, the majority of these studies has focused their attention on national and international companies hold in developed countries where the democracy is part of the national culture of their citizens (Mossberger, Wu & Crawford, 2013; Reilly & Hynan, 2014). But what happens when social media is introduced in companies where the national culture doesn’t have embedded the democracy principles? From a theoretical perspective, this study developed a framework based on the current literature in order to suggest several proposals about how the use of social media in this kind of companies affects on some organizational behaviors. Some of these effects on organizational behaviors are the changing in the way how managers lead their employees (Korzynski, 2013; Cho, Hwang & Lee, 2012), the new processes to take decisions that managers and employees use (Diga & Kelleher, 2009; Sigalaa & Chalkitib, 2014) and the ways how employees communicate among them and with managers (Huang, Baptista & Galliers, 2013; Kooa, Watia & Jungb, 2011). The results of this study allow to establish a framework and starting point to research on the effects of social media on organizational behaviors and consequently on the ways how these companies compete in their own countries and in international contexts.