Risks of Social Networking and Collaboration in Organisations

Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 22 January, 2009 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, social media, Web 2.0 |

The coverage of the benefits of social networking in organisations is plentiful however, the risks are not quite well covered.

Like every other initiative in organisations, setting up social networking requires time, effort and money to the organisation. Even though the cost of setting up a social network can be very low but the cost of maintaining relationships can be quite high in particular strong ties between two parties. This may not productive and cost effective in certain situations. Research by Granovetter shows that weak ties are more effective as they provide non-redundant information and less costly to maintain.

Social networks can also be quite dysfunctional and counter-productive due to certain actors in the network or lack of social beliefs and norms within the environment where actors do not have a clear set of governance framework nor cultural norms. This is a case of low level of embeddedness in the social network.

In the opposite case where embeddedness is overly powerful, the social network would be too deeply entrenched in their norms and beliefs and this would restrict innovation and thinking out of the box. This might also create a close group where “visitors are not welcomed”.

In some social networks where a key focal actor or sub-unit within the organisation controls many relationship, the destruction or demise of such an actor or sub-unit might cause catastrophic consequences. This will have a negative psychological impact on other actors in the network vicinity.

The problem of free-riding would always be a problem in social networks, however in the organisational environment, this might be deemed as a bigger issue as employees are fighting and jostling for pay rises and promotion and free riding (if exposed by others) will cause unnecessary tensions.

Above are just some of the risks of social network and collaboration in organisations, please feel free to comment or add to this list.

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