An Exploratory Study of Indian University Students' Use of Social Networking Web Sites: Implications for the Workplace

INCREASINGLY, INDIVIDUALS ACROSS the world seek relations of cooperation and collaboration rather than that of command and control.This need has influenced the rate at which individuals have allowed the Internet to intricately weave itself into their everyday lives in just over a decade (Hu & Ramirez, 2006).For many people, human interaction has truly adopted a virtual dimension.Online communities now link to one another and form a complicated technical web of interactions.Social networking Web sites (SNWs) are online tools that have transformed the virtual encounters of the past that were technical and impersonal to today's virtual socialization that is truly nontechnical, social, and interpersonal.The purpose of this article is to report the findings of a study we conducted among university students.We developed a survey to identify the reasons for which individuals use SNWs.We believe that these findings contribute to understanding future workplace expectations and arrangements. Survey and SampleWe created a 15-item survey that gave respondents various purposes for using SNWs (the items can be seen in Table 1).A 5-point Likert-type scale was used for ratings, where 1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree.A pilot study was first conducted with 29 respondents.Then, 427 business school students at a university in India took the survey.Approximately 67% of the respondents were males, while 33% were