Online Boundary Management model among Facebook Users.
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2016-05-30
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en
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Abstract
Young professionals are increasingly connected to professional contacts on Facebook and are becoming concerned about how they should behave online to ensure professionalism. They can engage in online boundary management behaviours by for instance limiting to whom they share personal information online, or selecting what information they share with their online connections. The purpose of this study was to find out to what extent the four online boundary management behaviours (content, audience, open and hybrid) as proposed by Ollier-Malaterre, Rothbard, and Berg (2013) are present online, and whether these behaviours were related to the drivers integration or segmentation of professional and private lives, and self-enhancement or self-verification as self-evaluation motives. A survey was conducted and a corpus of Facebook posts was collected. The study found that no relationship existed between self-evaluation motives and online behaviours, and that integration or segmentation of professional and private lives was related to online integration or segmentation behaviours. The study tested the online boundary management model as proposed by Ollier-Malaterre et al. (2013) and found that only integration or segmentation behaviours online are related to their offline equivalent. In addition, content boundary management behaviours were used most often. The results can be used to gain insight into the way individuals use Facebook and how they deal with professional and private contacts on social media platforms. The study fills the gap in existing research on online boundary management.
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Faculteit der Letteren