Workplace Boundaries and Social Media | Nancy Rothbard

How Social Media Impacts Office Culture

Dan Loney: The office culture has a variety of components to it, but one of the more compelling is that boundary between colleagues inside of the office, but also being friends outside of it. It is a challenge because it can blur the lines of what is normally accepted. Wharton’s Nancy Rothbard was part of research done in 2022 on this topic, which remains at the forefront of office etiquette, and Nancy joins us right now.

Nancy, what was it that drove you to look at this as an important area?

Nancy Rothbard: I’ve been obsessed over the last few years with online social media and how it is fundamentally transforming our work relationships as well as our nonwork relationships, but I’m primarily interested in the work relationships and how we interact with people at work.

Loney: This was, in part, looking at the information that employees collected in the course of working with others?

Rothbard: Yes, we did several studies where we asked people about their interactions with people at work. We asked them to recollect various situations that they had found themselves in, and we also asked them about current situations. We also relied on an archival dataset that was a nationally representative sample around how people used social media at work.

Loney: How has the influx of social media in our lives impacted work?

Rothbard: I think one of the things that was really interesting to us was just the prevalence of it. Most people are using some form of social media to connect with their colleagues in some way or another, and what that social media form is might vary across person and across type of role, across generation. There are different platforms that are more prevalent with college-age students or younger employees, and others that are more prevalent with older employees. It can vary what platform you’re using. But by and large, people are connected with their colleagues on one of these platforms very often.

Loney: That relationship in terms of the role that each person has within the company becomes an important point of focus on who you do or do not get in touch with outside of the office.

Rothbard: Absolutely. As we started to really examine these questions, we first started with some interviews with people, and one of the things that really struck me when we were talking with people about this phenomenon was that the hierarchical boundary between levels in organizations — boss, subordinate — really was powerful. It came up a lot in terms of how people thought about these questions. They might be very comfortable connecting with peers, but then very uncomfortable connecting across levels.

One of the funniest things to me was, when we would talk to people about this, a lot of times they would equate connecting with a boss on Facebook or Instagram as equivalent to connecting with their mother. It was sort of the same horror that they would they would express as they talked about those relationships.

Navigating New Boundaries at Work

Loney: How should companies and employees think about that process? Because there are some dynamics that probably could get a little tricky along the way.

Rothbard: A lot of companies have social media policies, and it’s not necessarily who you’re connecting with, but more what you are posting. Or, are you allowed to post stuff about work or about people at work? Sometimes it is about who you’re allowed to connect with so that there’s no conflicts of interest.

But what I would also say is that connecting on social media, especially throughout the last couple of years where we’ve engaged in more remote and hybrid work, it’s also an opportunity to know what’s going on in people’s lives. Just banning it entirely may not be the right approach. One has to think about, judiciously, who do you connect with, and what do you disclose to them, and what is that relationship so that you’re willing to blur the line between professional and personal?

Loney: You also talk about this element of self-disclosure and how that can ease the opportunity to have a relationship or a friendship outside of the office, when somebody is maybe talking about their kids or traffic or some component outside of what would normally be discussed in terms of the business.

Rothbard: One of the things that we found in the study is that people will be much more comfortable connecting to other people who disclose personal information. It doesn’t have to be deeply intimate personal information. By the way, cute dog pics are a very, very hot commodity. If you have a cute dog and you want to post pictures of them, that’s a very good strategy, because people always love them, and they feel like they know you, and they feel connected to you. It gives them a sense of warmth that you’re displaying and a feeling that they know something about you that’s important, and that’s not fake or surface level. So, that personal disclosure really helps to create a bond between you and your fellow co-workers.

Loney: How do you think that impacts the culture within the office? Because you used to hear the old story, don’t talk with your boss outside of the walls. Once you leave for the day, that’s it, you’re done. But it seems like that’s changing a little bit.

Rothbard: I think that that has changed a little bit. But what we also found in this study was a gender difference in terms of the expectation around self-disclosure and disclosure of personal information. We found a very complex three-way interaction effect between whether you’re a boss versus a peer, for example, and whether you are disclosing or not, and your gender. What we found was that women who disclosed more personal information — that really helped them, actually. That helped women bosses who disclosed personal information. People really responded positively to that.

For male bosses, interestingly, that personal disclosure didn’t help as much. We had both quantitative and qualitative data in these studies. And one of the quotes that I’ll never forget is, somebody was saying about a male boss who disclosed personal information, “I found it creepy.” Other comments about some of these male bosses were like, “Is he trying to spy on me?” It wasn’t quite as benign in terms of how it was interpreted when it was a male boss who was disclosing. This is one way in which gender role stereotypes around warmth and disclosure and connection were helping women bosses to be connected with others.

Loney: But we’ve kind of opened it up when you think about remote work and messaging channels, and the fact that, in many cases, messaging channels aren’t just about work anymore. There’s usually a channel about what’s going on in your life as well.

Rothbard: Absolutely. And some people really are very comfortable with that, and really embrace it, and they love the blurring of the work, nonwork boundary, and they just feel like this is a way to create a work family. Whereas other people feel less comfortable with that approach. I’ve done a lot of work on what I call integrators versus segmenters. And integrators are the ones that are very comfortable with blurring that boundary, where segmenters want to keep that bright line between the personal and the professional, and they feel really a lot of distress when that line is crossed. You have to really pay attention, as a colleague, to how other people like to interact around this, and understand that your preference may not be their preference. Respecting their boundaries may be also an important element to keep in mind.

Loney: You did this research in 2022. How has this process developed over the last couple of years?

Rothbard: I actually did this research both pre, during, and post pandemic. I think this social connection via social media and online platforms has become, in some ways, even more important in the world we’re living in now, where there is a lot more remote work, more hybrid work, where we need to find ways to connect in meaningful ways with our colleagues.

We have to find those ways to feel like we’ve gotten to know people. Sometimes the online social media provides a channel with which we can really deepen those relationships in a way that is also giving equal access to people. Some people might be working more remotely than others. But you know, having that access to what’s going on in people’s lives can help you form and build lasting relationships.