The Impact of User Behaviours on the Socialisation Process in Enterprise Social Networks

The success of teams in enterprise social networks (ESN) is of high importance in today’s project-based and digitised work environments. In this context, onboarding of new hires or allocated team members means the adoption of group characteristics and behaviours. Studies identified cohesion and trust as part of the socialisation process and found communication behaviours that facilitate socialisation. ESN not only enable efficient communication or relationship building, they also make the socialization processes visible and analysable. In this paper, we propose to use metrics from social network analysis (e.g. extraversion, openness and proactiveness) to operationalise communication behaviours identified as positive for socialisation. First evaluations with two ESN data sets in OLS, beta regression and multilevel models sparsely support the influence on closeness, which we expect to reflect the level of group integration.