Abstract
Undoubtedly, social media have been revolutionizing students’ ways of communication and interaction with others. The increasing popularity and influence of social media provide opportunities for instructors to leverage the power of new technologies, applications and platforms to improve teaching and student performance. In particular, students are increasingly relying on social media to facilitate their communication and collaboration for teamwork, especially complex team tasks. Social media as collaborative tools not only allow team members from diverse locations to work together, but also facilitate communication and knowledge sharing among them. Given this backdrop, this paper investigates the role of social media in team communication and team outcomes in the context of university teaching. In particular, the current study operationalizes the measurement of the social media capabilities construct based on the Media Synchronicity Theory (Dennis et al. 2008) and empirically tests the impacts of social media capabilities on three important aspects of student teamwork—namely administrative efficiency, knowledge sharing, and quality feedback on individual member’s work. A survey was conducted to collect the evaluation of five capabilities of social media by a convenient sampling of 109 undergraduate students from universities in Hong Kong and their use of social media in team project assignments. The data collected was analyzed using SmartPLS to empirically test the hypotheses. Parallelism, reprocessability, transmission velocity, and rehearsability were found as significant dimensions of social media capabilities. Social media capabilities are powerful in predicting teamwork outcomes—i.e., administrative
Author Information
Joy He, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
Xin Xu, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
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