Jeffrey W Treem
Biographic Data
| ID | 177863 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeffrey W Treem |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeffrey W |
| FAMILY NAME | Treem |
| SIGNATURE | TREEM J W |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3269-5559 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 366 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Attention dynamics on social technology platforms in organizations: An empirical study of structural and temporal mechanisms
In an era of digital ubiquity, organizations increasingly face challenges of capturing, managing, and channeling the limited attention of workers. This study examines interdependent patterns of attention allocation on a social technology platform. We collected digital traces and personnel records from a European aviation company and analyzed 56,502 time-stamped communicative events of 3346 workers using bipartite relational event models. The find…
Examining the Implications of Negativity Perceptions for Enterprise Social Media Use
Many organizations fail to optimally benefit from voluntary communication and collaboration tools -e.g. enterprise social media (ESM) -where use depends on workers' discretionary behaviors. This study explores how ESM use is informed by employees' perceptions of the content these media convey. Specifically, this paper reports on a survey study (N = 619) to examine the relationship between negativity perceptions and ESM use, through pro-sharing no…
Algorithmic management of crowdworkers: Implications for workers’ identity, belonging, and meaningfulness of work
Online labor platforms function as meta-organizations, blending elements of an open market and hierarchical structure by algorithmically governing goals and objectives. This study investigates how this algorithmic management approach influences the perceived meaningfulness of work among crowdworkers, with a particular focus on its effects through identity and belonging. Drawing on survey data collected from 1291 crowdworkers, our findings highlig…
Friendly skies and unfriendly workplace communication: Examining emotion displays on enterprise social media in the aviation industry
Researchers studying communication platforms in organizations (i.e., enterprise social media (ESM)) primarily focus on the implications of these technologies for knowledge sharing. In privileging task-based communication we risk overlooking the emotional aspects of communication inherent in worker interactions. This study investigates employees’ communication on ESM in two aviation companies. Interviews with employees (N = 39) revealed that they …
Signaling and meaning in organizational analytics: Coping with Goodhart’s Law in an era of digitization and datafication
The future of work will be measured. The increasing and widespread adoption of analytics, the use of digital inputs and outputs to inform organizational decision making, makes the communication of data central to organizing. This article applies and extends signaling theory to provide a framework for the study of analytics as communication. We report three cases that offer examples of dubious , selective , and ambiguous signaling in the activitie…
Motivations to use multifunctional public goods in organizations: Using Agent-Based Modeling to Explore Differential Uses of Enterprise Social Media
This work conceptualizes enterprise social media (ESM) as a multifunctional public good that both supports communication that connects users directly and allows users to contribute or access communal information. We show how differing motivations to use an ESM-connective or communal goals-interact with individuals' perceptions of activity on a platform, and the consequences this has for individual participation decisions and the viability of the …
Examining the longitudinal relationship between visibility and persistence on stress and technology-assisted supplemental work
This study examines the longitudinal relationship between two affordances of organizational information and communication technologies (ICTs)—that is, visibility and persistence—and individuals’ subjective stress and technology-assisted supplemental work (TASW). We propose that visibility and persistence associated with organizational ICTs are often more aptly construed as probabilities for action, rather than merely possibilities for action. The…
Examining communication visibility and social technology platform use in organizations
Organizations are increasingly adopting social technology platforms in an effort to support increased knowledge sharing among workers. Although scholarship has indicated that the use of social technologies can increase multiple forms of communication visibility within organizations, little is known about the nature of these relationships and how the benefits of that visibility may differ based on the use of different functionalities of platforms.…
An analysis of fear factors predicting enterprise social media use in an era of communication visibility
Purpose The benefits associated with visibility in organizations depend on employees' willingness to engage with technologies that utilize visible communication and make communication visible to others. Without the participation of workers, enterprise social media have limited value. This study develops a framework to assess what deters and drives employees' use of enterprise social media. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from 753 …
Why people engage in supplemental work: The role of technology, response expectations, and communication persistence
Supported by various collaboration technologies that allow communication from any place or time, employees increasingly engage in technology‐assisted supplemental work (TASW). Challenges associated with managing work and nonwork time have been further complicated by a global pandemic that has altered traditional work patterns and locations. To date, studies applying a TASW framework have focused mainly on individual uses of technology or connecti…
Specialists over generalists: Examining discursive closures and openings in expert collaborations
Prior research on expert collaborations has focused on how specialists – experts with deep domain knowledge – work across disciplinary boundaries with other specialists, with much less attention paid to how generalists – experts with broader and connective knowledge – work alongside specialists. To address this gap, we examined collaborative work requiring expertise of generalists (regional planners) and specialists (civil engineers). Our intervi…
Experts at Coordination: Examining the Performance, Production, and Value of Process Expertise
This paper argues that coordination among domain experts can be viewed as a distinct form of knowledge in itself, and an area in which an individual may become an expert. We discuss why domain experts may be ill-equipped to coordinate their knowledge with the knowledge of others, and why individuals with process expertise may be better equipped to facilitate coordination between domain experts. Drawing on a qualitative study of nurses organizing …
Behavioral Visibility: A new paradigm for organization studies in the age of digitization, digitalization, and datafication
The digitization, digitalization, and datafication of work and communication, coupled with social and technical infrastructures that enable connectivity, are making it increasingly easy for the behaviors of people, collectives, and technological devices to see and be seen. Such digital connectivity gives rise to the important phenomenon of behavioral visibility. We argue that studying the antecedents, processes, and consequences of behavioral vis…
Resourcing expertise: How existing schemas and communication processes shape the meaning of expert work in a global organization
This research draws on a resourcing perspective to challenge the assumption that expertise should be conceptualized as an asset with consistent value for organizations, and offers an alternative view that expertise is enacted through communicative processes that create resources-in-use. Analysis of the introduction of an offshoring center offering potential expert work in a global automotive company revealed that the meaning of this potential res…
Computer-Mediated Communication in the Age of Communication Visibility
This article argues that a distinctive aspect of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is the way it can make communication visible to others in ways that were previously impractical. We propose a theory of communication visibility that recognizes its multidimensional nature: resulting from activities that make communication visible, efforts by actors to see communication, and a sociomaterial context that influences possibilities for visibility. …
Communicative signaling of occupational fitness: How innovative ability is expressed and assessed
This study investigates how individuals working in the innovation field communicatively define the nature of their work and make assessments of others’ innovative ability. Drawing on signaling theory, this work explores what communicative signals are valued within an ambiguous professional context. Interviews with 36 innovation workers revealed that individuals perceive this emerging occupational role as comprised of skills and traits that vary i…
Analytics and expert collaboration: How individuals navigate relationships when working with organizational data
Analytics is heralded as an important, new and increasingly widespread organizational function, and one that promises new approaches for generating value from organizational knowledge. What is not yet clear is how analytics may affect how organizations work with data, or how organizations can realize the benefits of analytics. Analytics, envisioned as not just a technical skill but a reconceptualization of data’s place in the organization, may im…
Organizational Media Affordances: Operationalization and Associations with Media Use
The concept of affordances has been increasingly applied to the study of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in organizational contexts. However, almost no research operationalizes affordances, limiting comparisons and programmatic research. This article briefly reviews conceptualizations and possibilities of affordances in general and for media, then introduces the concept of organizational media affordances as organizational resou…
What We Are Talking About When We Talk About Social Media: A Framework for Study
Social media continues to grow as a focus of social, organizational, and scholarly interest, yet there is little agreement as to what constitutes social media and how it can be effectively analyzed. We review various definitions of social media and note that much of the confusion regarding social media comes from conflation between social media types, platforms, and activities. To facilitate investigations of social media, we debunk common social…
Explicating Affordances: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Affordances in Communication Research
This study aims to clarify inconsistencies regarding the term affordances by examining how affordances terminology is used in empirical research on communication and technology. Through an analysis of 82 communication-oriented scholarly works on affordances, we identify 3 inconsistencies regarding the use of this term. First, much research describes a particular affordance without engaging other scholarship addressing that affordance. Second, sev…
Bringing Technological Frames to Work: How Previous Experience with Social Media Shapes the Technology's Meaning in an Organization
This study examines the expectations that workers have regarding enterprise social media (ESM). Using interviews with 58 employees at an organization implementing an ESM platform, we compare workers' views of the technology with those of existing workplace communication technologies and publicly available social media. We find individuals' frames regarding expectations and assumptions of social media are established through activities outside wor…
Social Media as Technologies of Accountability: Explaining Resistance to Implementation Within Organizations
This study extends recent work exploring the affordances of social media in organizations by considering how social media may also operate as technologies of accountability. This perspective adopts a performative view of social media use in organizations and recognizes that the technologies not only display communication to organizational members but also, in doing so, potentially increase the accountability of workers. Using a case study of the …
Technology Use as a Status Cue: The Influences of Mundane and Novel Technologies on Knowledge Assessments in Organizations
This study explores the relationship between the use of information and communication technologies (ICTS) and assessments of workers' knowledge and abilities in 2 knowledge-intensive organizations. Drawing on expectation states theory, the article argues that a worker's communication through mundane, widely diffused ICTS may lead to status assessments from colleagues that are different than when he or she communicates through novel ICTS. Data fro…
Social Media Use in Organizations: Exploring the Affordances of Visibility, Editability, Persistence, and Association
The use of social media technologies—such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, social tagging, and microblogging—is proliferating at an incredible pace. One area of increasing adoption is organizational settings where managers hope that these new technologies will help improve important organizational processes. However, scholarship has largely failed to explain if and how uses of social media in organizations differ from existing forms of c…
Communicating Expertise: Knowledge Performances in Professional-Service Firms
Researchers in many disciplines treat expertise as an individually held attribute that allows for consistently superior performance in a specific domain. However, in knowledge-intensive environments, where work practices are ill-defined, invisible, and their outputs are ambiguous, attributions of expertise are not likely to emerge solely from objective criteria such as task performance or professional standing. This study offers an alternative co…
Explicating Affordances: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Affordances in Communication Research
This study aims to clarify inconsistencies regarding the term affordances by examining how affordances terminology is used in empirical research on communication and technology. Through an analysis of 82 communication-oriented scholarly works on affordances, we identify 3 inconsistencies regarding the use of this term. First, much research describes a particular affordance without engaging other scholarship addressing that affordance. Second, sev…
Social Media Use in Organizations: Exploring the Affordances of Visibility, Editability, Persistence, and Association
The use of social media technologies—such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, social tagging, and microblogging—is proliferating at an incredible pace. One area of increasing adoption is organizational settings where managers hope that these new technologies will help improve important organizational processes. However, scholarship has largely failed to explain if and how uses of social media in organizations differ from existing forms of c…
Computer-Mediated Communication in the Age of Communication Visibility
This article argues that a distinctive aspect of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is the way it can make communication visible to others in ways that were previously impractical. We propose a theory of communication visibility that recognizes its multidimensional nature: resulting from activities that make communication visible, efforts by actors to see communication, and a sociomaterial context that influences possibilities for visibility. …
Communicating Expertise: Knowledge Performances in Professional-Service Firms
Researchers in many disciplines treat expertise as an individually held attribute that allows for consistently superior performance in a specific domain. However, in knowledge-intensive environments, where work practices are ill-defined, invisible, and their outputs are ambiguous, attributions of expertise are not likely to emerge solely from objective criteria such as task performance or professional standing. This study offers an alternative co…
Why people engage in supplemental work: The role of technology, response expectations, and communication persistence
Supported by various collaboration technologies that allow communication from any place or time, employees increasingly engage in technology‐assisted supplemental work (TASW). Challenges associated with managing work and nonwork time have been further complicated by a global pandemic that has altered traditional work patterns and locations. To date, studies applying a TASW framework have focused mainly on individual uses of technology or connecti…
Social Media as Technologies of Accountability: Explaining Resistance to Implementation Within Organizations
This study extends recent work exploring the affordances of social media in organizations by considering how social media may also operate as technologies of accountability. This perspective adopts a performative view of social media use in organizations and recognizes that the technologies not only display communication to organizational members but also, in doing so, potentially increase the accountability of workers. Using a case study of the …
What We Are Talking About When We Talk About Social Media: A Framework for Study
Social media continues to grow as a focus of social, organizational, and scholarly interest, yet there is little agreement as to what constitutes social media and how it can be effectively analyzed. We review various definitions of social media and note that much of the confusion regarding social media comes from conflation between social media types, platforms, and activities. To facilitate investigations of social media, we debunk common social…
An analysis of fear factors predicting enterprise social media use in an era of communication visibility
Purpose The benefits associated with visibility in organizations depend on employees' willingness to engage with technologies that utilize visible communication and make communication visible to others. Without the participation of workers, enterprise social media have limited value. This study develops a framework to assess what deters and drives employees' use of enterprise social media. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from 753 …
Examining communication visibility and social technology platform use in organizations
Organizations are increasingly adopting social technology platforms in an effort to support increased knowledge sharing among workers. Although scholarship has indicated that the use of social technologies can increase multiple forms of communication visibility within organizations, little is known about the nature of these relationships and how the benefits of that visibility may differ based on the use of different functionalities of platforms.…
Analytics and expert collaboration: How individuals navigate relationships when working with organizational data
Analytics is heralded as an important, new and increasingly widespread organizational function, and one that promises new approaches for generating value from organizational knowledge. What is not yet clear is how analytics may affect how organizations work with data, or how organizations can realize the benefits of analytics. Analytics, envisioned as not just a technical skill but a reconceptualization of data’s place in the organization, may im…
Specialists over generalists: Examining discursive closures and openings in expert collaborations
Prior research on expert collaborations has focused on how specialists – experts with deep domain knowledge – work across disciplinary boundaries with other specialists, with much less attention paid to how generalists – experts with broader and connective knowledge – work alongside specialists. To address this gap, we examined collaborative work requiring expertise of generalists (regional planners) and specialists (civil engineers). Our intervi…
Focused on the prize: Characteristics of experts in massive multiplayer online games
This study is the first large–scale multi–method attempt to empirically examine the characteristics leading to development of expertise in EverQuest II, a popular massively multi–player online role–playing game (MMOs). Benefiting from the unprecedented opportunity of obtaining game log data matched with survey data, the project investigated the relationship between player motivations and in–game behavior, personality characteristics, and demograp…
Communicating Expertise: Knowledge Performances in Professional-Service Firms
Researchers in many disciplines treat expertise as an individually held attribute that allows for consistently superior performance in a specific domain. However, in knowledge-intensive environments, where work practices are ill-defined, invisible, and their outputs are ambiguous, attributions of expertise are not likely to emerge solely from objective criteria such as task performance or professional standing. This study offers an alternative co…
Technology Use as a Status Cue: The Influences of Mundane and Novel Technologies on Knowledge Assessments in Organizations
This study explores the relationship between the use of information and communication technologies (ICTS) and assessments of workers' knowledge and abilities in 2 knowledge-intensive organizations. Drawing on expectation states theory, the article argues that a worker's communication through mundane, widely diffused ICTS may lead to status assessments from colleagues that are different than when he or she communicates through novel ICTS. Data fro…
Social Media Use in Organizations: Exploring the Affordances of Visibility, Editability, Persistence, and Association
The use of social media technologies—such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, social tagging, and microblogging—is proliferating at an incredible pace. One area of increasing adoption is organizational settings where managers hope that these new technologies will help improve important organizational processes. However, scholarship has largely failed to explain if and how uses of social media in organizations differ from existing forms of c…
Bringing Technological Frames to Work: How Previous Experience with Social Media Shapes the Technology's Meaning in an Organization
This study examines the expectations that workers have regarding enterprise social media (ESM). Using interviews with 58 employees at an organization implementing an ESM platform, we compare workers' views of the technology with those of existing workplace communication technologies and publicly available social media. We find individuals' frames regarding expectations and assumptions of social media are established through activities outside wor…
Social Media as Technologies of Accountability: Explaining Resistance to Implementation Within Organizations
This study extends recent work exploring the affordances of social media in organizations by considering how social media may also operate as technologies of accountability. This perspective adopts a performative view of social media use in organizations and recognizes that the technologies not only display communication to organizational members but also, in doing so, potentially increase the accountability of workers. Using a case study of the …
What We Are Talking About When We Talk About Social Media: A Framework for Study
Social media continues to grow as a focus of social, organizational, and scholarly interest, yet there is little agreement as to what constitutes social media and how it can be effectively analyzed. We review various definitions of social media and note that much of the confusion regarding social media comes from conflation between social media types, platforms, and activities. To facilitate investigations of social media, we debunk common social…
Explicating Affordances: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Affordances in Communication Research
This study aims to clarify inconsistencies regarding the term affordances by examining how affordances terminology is used in empirical research on communication and technology. Through an analysis of 82 communication-oriented scholarly works on affordances, we identify 3 inconsistencies regarding the use of this term. First, much research describes a particular affordance without engaging other scholarship addressing that affordance. Second, sev…
Organizational Media Affordances: Operationalization and Associations with Media Use
The concept of affordances has been increasingly applied to the study of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in organizational contexts. However, almost no research operationalizes affordances, limiting comparisons and programmatic research. This article briefly reviews conceptualizations and possibilities of affordances in general and for media, then introduces the concept of organizational media affordances as organizational resou…
Communicative signaling of occupational fitness: How innovative ability is expressed and assessed
This study investigates how individuals working in the innovation field communicatively define the nature of their work and make assessments of others’ innovative ability. Drawing on signaling theory, this work explores what communicative signals are valued within an ambiguous professional context. Interviews with 36 innovation workers revealed that individuals perceive this emerging occupational role as comprised of skills and traits that vary i…
Analytics and expert collaboration: How individuals navigate relationships when working with organizational data
Analytics is heralded as an important, new and increasingly widespread organizational function, and one that promises new approaches for generating value from organizational knowledge. What is not yet clear is how analytics may affect how organizations work with data, or how organizations can realize the benefits of analytics. Analytics, envisioned as not just a technical skill but a reconceptualization of data’s place in the organization, may im…
Computer-Mediated Communication in the Age of Communication Visibility
This article argues that a distinctive aspect of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is the way it can make communication visible to others in ways that were previously impractical. We propose a theory of communication visibility that recognizes its multidimensional nature: resulting from activities that make communication visible, efforts by actors to see communication, and a sociomaterial context that influences possibilities for visibility. …
Experts at Coordination: Examining the Performance, Production, and Value of Process Expertise
This paper argues that coordination among domain experts can be viewed as a distinct form of knowledge in itself, and an area in which an individual may become an expert. We discuss why domain experts may be ill-equipped to coordinate their knowledge with the knowledge of others, and why individuals with process expertise may be better equipped to facilitate coordination between domain experts. Drawing on a qualitative study of nurses organizing …
Behavioral Visibility: A new paradigm for organization studies in the age of digitization, digitalization, and datafication
The digitization, digitalization, and datafication of work and communication, coupled with social and technical infrastructures that enable connectivity, are making it increasingly easy for the behaviors of people, collectives, and technological devices to see and be seen. Such digital connectivity gives rise to the important phenomenon of behavioral visibility. We argue that studying the antecedents, processes, and consequences of behavioral vis…
Resourcing expertise: How existing schemas and communication processes shape the meaning of expert work in a global organization
This research draws on a resourcing perspective to challenge the assumption that expertise should be conceptualized as an asset with consistent value for organizations, and offers an alternative view that expertise is enacted through communicative processes that create resources-in-use. Analysis of the introduction of an offshoring center offering potential expert work in a global automotive company revealed that the meaning of this potential res…
Why people engage in supplemental work: The role of technology, response expectations, and communication persistence
Supported by various collaboration technologies that allow communication from any place or time, employees increasingly engage in technology‐assisted supplemental work (TASW). Challenges associated with managing work and nonwork time have been further complicated by a global pandemic that has altered traditional work patterns and locations. To date, studies applying a TASW framework have focused mainly on individual uses of technology or connecti…
Specialists over generalists: Examining discursive closures and openings in expert collaborations
Prior research on expert collaborations has focused on how specialists – experts with deep domain knowledge – work across disciplinary boundaries with other specialists, with much less attention paid to how generalists – experts with broader and connective knowledge – work alongside specialists. To address this gap, we examined collaborative work requiring expertise of generalists (regional planners) and specialists (civil engineers). Our intervi…
Examining the longitudinal relationship between visibility and persistence on stress and technology-assisted supplemental work
This study examines the longitudinal relationship between two affordances of organizational information and communication technologies (ICTs)—that is, visibility and persistence—and individuals’ subjective stress and technology-assisted supplemental work (TASW). We propose that visibility and persistence associated with organizational ICTs are often more aptly construed as probabilities for action, rather than merely possibilities for action. The…
Examining communication visibility and social technology platform use in organizations
Organizations are increasingly adopting social technology platforms in an effort to support increased knowledge sharing among workers. Although scholarship has indicated that the use of social technologies can increase multiple forms of communication visibility within organizations, little is known about the nature of these relationships and how the benefits of that visibility may differ based on the use of different functionalities of platforms.…
An analysis of fear factors predicting enterprise social media use in an era of communication visibility
Purpose The benefits associated with visibility in organizations depend on employees' willingness to engage with technologies that utilize visible communication and make communication visible to others. Without the participation of workers, enterprise social media have limited value. This study develops a framework to assess what deters and drives employees' use of enterprise social media. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from 753 …
Signaling and meaning in organizational analytics: Coping with Goodhart’s Law in an era of digitization and datafication
The future of work will be measured. The increasing and widespread adoption of analytics, the use of digital inputs and outputs to inform organizational decision making, makes the communication of data central to organizing. This article applies and extends signaling theory to provide a framework for the study of analytics as communication. We report three cases that offer examples of dubious , selective , and ambiguous signaling in the activitie…
Motivations to use multifunctional public goods in organizations: Using Agent-Based Modeling to Explore Differential Uses of Enterprise Social Media
This work conceptualizes enterprise social media (ESM) as a multifunctional public good that both supports communication that connects users directly and allows users to contribute or access communal information. We show how differing motivations to use an ESM-connective or communal goals-interact with individuals' perceptions of activity on a platform, and the consequences this has for individual participation decisions and the viability of the …
Examining the Implications of Negativity Perceptions for Enterprise Social Media Use
Many organizations fail to optimally benefit from voluntary communication and collaboration tools -e.g. enterprise social media (ESM) -where use depends on workers' discretionary behaviors. This study explores how ESM use is informed by employees' perceptions of the content these media convey. Specifically, this paper reports on a survey study (N = 619) to examine the relationship between negativity perceptions and ESM use, through pro-sharing no…
Algorithmic management of crowdworkers: Implications for workers’ identity, belonging, and meaningfulness of work
Online labor platforms function as meta-organizations, blending elements of an open market and hierarchical structure by algorithmically governing goals and objectives. This study investigates how this algorithmic management approach influences the perceived meaningfulness of work among crowdworkers, with a particular focus on its effects through identity and belonging. Drawing on survey data collected from 1291 crowdworkers, our findings highlig…
Friendly skies and unfriendly workplace communication: Examining emotion displays on enterprise social media in the aviation industry
Researchers studying communication platforms in organizations (i.e., enterprise social media (ESM)) primarily focus on the implications of these technologies for knowledge sharing. In privileging task-based communication we risk overlooking the emotional aspects of communication inherent in worker interactions. This study investigates employees’ communication on ESM in two aviation companies. Interviews with employees (N = 39) revealed that they …
Computer Science (22 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Knowledge management (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Knowledge Management and Sharing (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Public relations (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Engineering (9 works) · Business (8 works)