Brown Bag: Prof. Leonardi

About the Speaker: 

external pagePaul Leonardicall_made (Ph.D., Stanford University) is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also the Investment Group of Santa Barbara Founding Director of the Master of Technology Management Program. Leonardi’s research focuses on how companies can design their organizational networks and implement new technologies to more effectively create and share knowledge. He is particularly interested in how data intensive technologies, such as simulation and social media tools, enable new ways to access, store, and share information; how the new sources of information these technologies provide can change work routines and communication partners; and how shifts in employees’ work and communication alter the nature of an organization's expertise.

He has won awards for his research from the Academy of Management, the American Sociological Association, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Association for Information Systems, the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association, and the National Science Foundation.

Over the past decade, he has consulted with for-profit and non-profit organizations about how to manage the human aspects of new technology implementation. His recent engagements have focused on helping companies to improve communication between departments, to use social technologies to enhance internal knowledge sharing, and to strengthen global product development operations.

The chair of Strategic Management and Innovation invites you to a brown bag seminar on Wednesday, May 10, 2017, at 12:00 in room WEV H326. We hope many of you can join the talk by Prof. Paul Leonardi.

Title: Social Media and Shared Cognition: Exploring the Effects of Network Expansion, Content Integration, and Triggered Recalling 

Abstract: This study is organized around two goals. The first goal is to determine 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 people in the organization know. The second goal is to explore what behaviors associated with social media use allow employees to develop such shared cognition about their coworkers’ knowledge and social structures. Given the distinct, yet complementary nature of these goals, I conducted a multi-methodological, longitudinal field study of the use of one type of social media – a social networking site – by employees at a large financial services organization. This study takes advantage of a comparative analysis in which only one of two matched-sample groups within the same organization was given access to the social networking site for six months; the other group was not. The findings 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. 

About the Speaker: Paul Leonardi is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also the Investment Group of Santa Barbara Founding Director of the Master of Technology Management Program. Leonardi’s research focuses on how companies can design their organizational networks and implement new technologies to more effectively create and share knowledge. He is particularly interested in how data intensive technologies, such as simulation and social media tools, enable new ways to access, store, and share information; how the new sources of information these technologies provide can change work routines and communication partners; and how shifts in employees’ work and communication alter the nature of an organization's expertise.

Schedule: 12.00 Joint Lunch (We provide sandwiches and drinks); 12.30-14.00 Presentation and discussion

Location: WEV H326, MTEC, ETH Zurich (Weinbergstrasse 56-58, 8092 Zürich)

Look forward to seeing you there.