Social Media and the Development of Shared Cognition: The Roles of Network Expansion, Content Integration, and Triggered Recalling

This study explores whether employees who have access to social media are more likely than employees who do not to develop shared cognition—similar perceptions of what and whom coworkers know. It also uncovers the behaviors associated with social media that allow employees to develop such shared cognition about their coworkers’ knowledge and social structures. I conducted a multimethodological, longitudinal field study of the use of one type of social media—a social networking site—by employees at a large financial services organization. In this paper, I draw on comparative data from two matched-sample groups within the same organization to show that users of the social networking site developed their cognition through three interrelated processes—network expansion, content integration, and triggered recalling. Because all members of the organization enacted this process with data from the same common pool (content on the social networking site), their cognitions became shared. A difference-in-differences estimation showed that shared cognition developed much more strongly over six months in the group that used the social networking site than the group that did not use it.