Dual group membership and behaviour on an online collaboration platform

In this paper we show that posting behavior of members who are active in two online groups on ESNs is influenced by the total number of members who are active in both groups. Knowledge intensive organizations increasingly use enterprise social networks (ESNs), online platforms for knowledge dissemination through online posts. In these networks, people organize themselves to work towards a collective goal by means of online groups. However, knowledge on how people behave in these online groups, and why, is limited. In particular, we need to investigate behavior of people who are a member of more than one group, because they occupy crucial positions for disseminating knowledge and information throughout their groups and ultimately throughout the organization. Our study provides important insights for knowledge sharing in organizations through online groups. Specifically, we shed light on the influence of the number of people that are active in two groups on the posting behavior of these people who we coin ‘bridging members’. Based on a study of one ESN from a large Dutch service sector company and drawing on social network theory, we find that posting behavior largely depends on the number of people who occupy the same structural position.