earticle

영어

As communication technologies provide a new space for relationship formation, expansion and diversification of social ties, research has questioned whether on-line social ties can replace off-line ones in an organizational context.
Yet, the role of on-line relationships in work groups still remains unclear, calling for empirical examination. By integrating social capital theory and social cognitive theory, we explore the different mechanisms of on-line social interaction ties that underlie an individual’s knowledgesharing through the comparative perspectives of collocated vs. dispersed teams.
Given this purpose, we link social interaction ties with other facets of social capital and outcome expectation.
Next, using social network analysis, we empirically test the proposed model with 186 individuals: 84 in collocated teams and 102 in dispersed teams. The study finds that the strength of on-line social interaction ties does not add value to collocated teams, while it plays a critical role in accumulating social capital and knowledge sharing by compensating for the lack of off-line social ties in the dispersed team.