Abstract:
Social networking is a new trend which is emerging in Sri Lanka with the collaborative internet technologies. While this is on the rise as a habit amongst the Sri Lankans, the research conducted to understand the key implications of this rising habits on the performance of the employees within their work environment is not appropriately researched. The study has been conducted as an exploratory study due to the fact that similar caliber of researches hasn't been conducted yet in Sri Lankan context. Therefore the study caters as an entry point for the domain of social networking in Sri Lanka with regard to employee performance. Further, the study aimed to identify whether there is a significant relationship between the social networking usage and the employee performance in the Sri Lankan IT organizations.
The study has indicate that there are no direct statistically significant relationships between the social networking usage attributes and employee performance, thus does not show that the social networking has any direct impact on the employee performance. This further indicates that by controlling the usage of the social networking, there is no guarantee of improved performance or decreased levels of performance. However, the study indicates that there are a number of areas such as personal usage of social networking, types of social networking, advantages and disadvantages associated with social networking etc. which the organizations will have to consider on the social networking areas.
The study identifies that majority of the employees would use social networking for personal purposes than office or knowledge sharing purposes. Further, they would use sites which are highly resources consuming and this will lead to a number of negative implications on the office networks. It is also evident that the offices would allow free usage of the internet without mostly restricting the social networking sites. This would create unnecessary implications which would lead the companies to harmful impacts on the social networking fronts.
Thus, even though the study did not prove any connection between the social networking and the performance, the study has formulated a number of hints on detail usage patterns which is useful in effectively establishing the concept and using this to benefit the organizations in concern.
