律師社交媒體使用對其工作效率的影響研究–基於工作重塑的視角

Abstract

Social media is not only impacting people's lives on a large scale, but also increasingly being used in organizations. Social media is also increasingly being used by lawyers to support communication and collaboration with colleagues or clients.

The communication function of social media supports communication among colleagues in different locations and time zones, facilitating information broadcasting such that information can spread among individuals and specific colleagues or groups. Besides, social media is malleable, i.e., users can decide how to use the communication functions and actively share various types of information in the system, including work-related information or nonwork-related information. For lawyers, using social media at work will bring great changes to their work including enabling lawyers to manage communications with multiple colleagues or clients in different groups simultaneously in a more efficient way, and facilitating them to have access to more information about the work status and personal information of colleagues and clients. Meanwhile, the malleability of social media facilitates lawyers to actively choose how to use the system to complete tasks, which makes it possible for lawyers to design their own work. To capture this issue, this thesis proposes that the use of social media at work will lead lawyers to craft their work (i.e., job crafting) and further influence their work efficiency. Understanding lawyers’ job crafting behaviors induced by the social media use at work will help to understand the mechanism about how social media use affects work efficiency and how lawyers cope with the changes brought by the technology.

Previous studies have discussed the effects of individual-related characteristics and environmental factors (e.g., leadership in the organization, social support from colleagues, etc.) on employees’ job crafting behaviors. There is a lack of discussion on the impact of information technology on employees' job crafting behaviors as well as the analysis of lawyers’ job crafting behaviors. The main purpose of this thesis is to explore and analyze the impact of social media use on lawyers’ job crafting behaviors.

The thesis first reviews the literature on the role of social media use in work and job crafting. Based on job demands-resources theory and the challenge – hindrance framework of job demands, the thesis specifies three kinds of changes caused by social media use namely the changes in job resources, the changes in challenge demands, and the changes in hindrance demands. Further, considering that job crafting can be either in an approach way or an avoidance way, this thesis identifies six types of job crafting and further examines the impacts of these six job crafting behaviors.

A survey of lawyers was used to test the research model and hypotheses, and structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data. The results indicate that the use of social media in the workplace supports lawyers to get access to more resources, including autonomy, opportunities for professional development, performance feedback and information support. It has also led to the increase of challenge job demands, including workload, time urgency and learning opportunities, and the increase of hindrance job demands which includes resource constraints, role ambiguity and role conflict. The changes of job resources will lead to lawyers’ approach resource crafting behaviors and avoidance resource crafting behaviors. The changes in challenge job demands will be positively associated with approach challenge demand crafting behaviors and avoidance challenge demand crafting behaviors, while hinderance job demands will lead to approach hinderance demand crafting behaviors and avoidance hindrance demand crafting behaviors. All the three types of approach crafting behaviors contribute to the increase of lawyers’ work efficiency. In contrast, for the three types of avoidance crafting behaviors, only the avoidance hindrance demand crafting behaviors is found to significantly influence work efficiency.

The thesis makes theoretical contributions to the literature on job crafting and the research on social media use at work. The thesis also provides guidance for lawyers to understand how the use of social media at work affects their job crafting behaviors and how to cope with the changes brought by social media use.

Date of Award	24 Oct 2022
Original language	Chinese (Traditional)
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Lihua Huang (External Supervisor), Jingjun David XU (Supervisor) & Kai H. LIM (Supervisor)