For the most part, social media is what you make it. You choose whom to keep tabs on, who can follow you back, what you “like,” and which snippets of your life you reveal. But what if those carefully curated depictions are suddenly on the table at your next quarterly review with your manager?
It can be challenging to navigate the boundaries between our workplace and personal lives, causing us to weigh whether to bring a plus-one to the office party or keep a family photo on our desk. But social media adds a whole new level of complexity, and today many employees are hesitant to “friend” colleagues and managers online, fearing that the connection could come with career risks, according to a recent study in the Academy of Management Journal.
The study—OMG! My Boss Just Friended Me: How Evaluations of Colleagues’ Disclosure, Gender, and Rank Shape Personal/Professional Boundary Blurring Online—was coauthored by Nancy P. Rothbard, David Pottruck Professor of Management of the Wharton School of Business; Lakshmi Ramarajan, the Anna Spangler Nelson and Thomas C. Nelson Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, Professor of Organizations and Human Resources at Université du Québec à Montréal; and Wharton doctoral candidate Serenity Lee.
"Sharing information about one’s personal lifestyle and beliefs online with the wrong colleague may expose employees to career consequences."
The research team says navigating boundary blurring is a “thorny issue” for employees, forcing people to master an important new “digital social skill”: carefully choosing to share online space with some colleagues and not others, and considering whether the connection will enhance their relationship—and career—or cause it to suffer.
“On the one hand, letting a colleague into one’s personal world online signals an acceptance of vulnerability that opens up paths to a richer multiplex relationship, which may in turn facilitate collaboration and teamwork,” the authors write. “On the other hand, sharing information about one’s personal lifestyle and beliefs online with the wrong colleague may expose employees to career consequences, such as not being hired or promoted and being discriminated against.”
Workers are wary of friending bosses
Across four studies, the authors examined which colleagues we feel comfortable connecting with online—and which we don’t.
First, the research team looked at 2014 Pew Research Center survey data, showing that two-thirds of professionals on Facebook say they’ve connected with colleagues online. Next, they surveyed 513 full-time professionals working in a variety of industries in the United States. Seventy-nine percent of participants reported being Facebook friends with colleagues, while claiming to rarely send friend requests of their own and rejecting up to half of the colleague friend requests they received.
The team then used mock Facebook profiles among a sample group to study how three key factors—gender, rank, and openness—played into people’s decisions about which colleagues they preferred to see online. In a final study, participants were asked to recall whether they connected with former and current colleagues in real life.
"Maybe you invite your boss to your house, but you’re not going to invite the boss to the Vegas party, and those are the pictures he’s going to see."
Study results showed that participants felt less comfortable connecting with their bosses, feeling it was risky to show “the other side” of themselves to managers they have to face in the office on Monday morning, Ramarajan says.
“Maybe you invite your boss to your house, but you’re not going to invite the boss to the Vegas party, and those are the pictures he’s going to see,” says Ramarajan. “When they’re on your Facebook account, those boundaries are uncontrollable and permanent, and people can make inferences about those elements and amplify that vulnerability.”
Bosses should be aware that subordinates are often hesitant to connect with them and should carefully consider whether initiating a connection request will make a particular employee uncomfortable, Ramarajan says. As one participant in the study noted after getting a friend request from a manager, “I felt like [my boss] was trying to seem hip and relatable, but I was also worried he was spying on me.”
Meanwhile, workers also avoided colleagues they perceived as standoffish in real life. “We see them as somehow not forthcoming enough, so we’re not willing to make ourselves vulnerable to them online,” Ramarajan says.
People seek out warm colleagues
Study results showed that employees were more willing to accept friend requests from people they perceived as warm and willing to disclose more, including those who already share a lot about their personal lives around the office. Specifically, workers were more open to connecting with:
- Women: Participants reported being eight times more likely to connect with female bosses they considered to be warm in the workplace than women they didn’t. And they were four times more likely to connect with warm women than with friendly male counterparts. Overall, participants were twice as likely to connect with female workers than male colleagues.
- Workplace peers: Participants were drawn to peers, especially those they saw as warm and willing to share details from their personal lives. For example, one participant described a warm colleague this way: “His wife just had a baby and he’s the happiest guy in the world right now. So he posts a lot of baby and wife photos on Facebook, all very cute and charming.”
We’re told to ‘bring your whole self to work,’ but that’s not so easy
“People were just as reluctant to connect with male bosses, whether or not they shared information about their personal lives, as they were with female bosses who did not share information about their personal lives,” Ramarajan says. “But female bosses who were open and shared information about themselves were more likely to be connected with subordinates on Facebook. We suggest this is because people view women who share personal information as warm, which offsets the view of bosses as lacking warmth.”
Be careful what you share
The researchers hope their work sheds light on the complexities of the workplace identities people create and the ongoing challenges found in maintaining boundaries in the expanding digital world, especially following the pandemic, when so many professional-personal lines were blurred.
“We’re told to ‘bring your whole self to work,’ but that’s not so easy to enact because you’re getting mixed messages in society,” says Rothbard. “On one hand, we’re told to blur those boundaries and show us who you are—your true authentic self. On the other hand, sometimes we do that, and people don’t like who that true authentic self is because it’s different or seen as inappropriate because of your hierarchical status or role. It’s a really challenging puzzle.”
With employees’ professional and personal lives continuing to collide in cyberspace, the research team says workers should be aware that stereotypes based on colleagues’ gender and rank may factor into their decisions about which colleagues to “friend.” And they suggest that workers should carefully consider what they share with all work colleagues online, advising: “[People] may want to customize the information they share with different audiences.”
About the Author
Rachel Kim Raczka is a writer based in the Boston area.
[Image: iStockphoto]
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