Social media and emotions in organisational knowledge creation

Social media increases the connectivity of people inside and outside an organisation. It is not just the implementation of communication technology, but the transformation of working and organisational cultures. The paper presumes that social media provides new opportunities to the organisational knowledge creation process by amplifying knowledge created by individuals as well as crystallising and connecting it to an organisation´s knowledge system. The process depends fundamentally on the individual´s tacit knowledge and its conversion into organisational explicit knowledge. Knowledge conversion is not a linear and sequential process, but a process which is affected by the individual´s emotions. This paper explores the interplay between knowledge and emotions in the organisational knowledge creation process in the context of social media. The paper concludes that knowledge and emotion shared in social media contribute to the social identity, which increases the odds of altruistic behaviour towards others in a way that benefits the organisation.