An Experimental Study of Online Boundary Management Behaviours and Their Effects on Employees’ Attitudes.

Abstract

In today’s online social networks it appears that employees’ borders between private and work lives are becoming vaguer than they used to be. Due to the collision of professional and personal lives online, it seems unclear how employees should present themselves. The purpose of this study was therefore to gain more insights into the effects of how employees represent themselves in online social networks. Two sets of online boundary management behaviours were examined. These two sets of behaviours differed in how employees manage their personal and professional identities on Facebook. Results indicated that people do not seem to make a distinction between how a colleague represents himself online. An explanation for this could be the shift from offline to online interaction. This shift has prompted people’s professional and private lives to overlap, and as a result, colleagues may not be perceived differently than any other contacts on Facebook.