Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/438743
JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2015 BizEd 13 THE COMPLEXITY OF DIGITAL IDENTITY The age of social media has brought with it many jokes about the hours people waste online checking their feeds. But what draws them to social media in the first place? Social media users are engaging in a deeply human practice called "identity work," or the "shaping, managing, and working at one's concept of self," say Ulrike Schultze, professor of information tech- nology and operations management at Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business in Dallas, Texas; and Magnus Bergquist, senior lecturer in informatics at Sweden's University of Gothenburg. Identity work has been studied in face-to-face inter- actions, but Schultze and Bergquist studied the phenomenon in the digital arena. In 2010, the researchers examined 40 hours of interviews and 120 photo-diary en- tries of eight residents of the online virtual world Second Life. The pair identified three types of social discourse: market, involving commercial transactions using Second Life's currency, the Linden Dollar; play, involving activities impossible in the real world, such as flying; and sociality, which refers to relationships, group participation, and social obligations. Sociality also allows individuals to experiment with identities other than those they have in real life. On Twitter and Facebook, market discourse measures users' social capital by the num- ber friends or followers they have. Companies that pay attention to the dis- course most valued on a network can better target their social media strategies, say the authors. Individuals, too, must become more adept at managing their digital lives, which are quickly becoming intertwined with their real ones, especially now that online users can "tag" acquaintances in online posts in ways largely outside their control. "Even though you can leave a cyber- body behind and create a new identity on a new site, these undeletable bodies live on in some shape or form," says Schultze. "Managing your identity thus increasingly becomes hard work." Their paper "Towards a Discursive Theo- ry of Social Media Affordances" is currently under review. Two Stars May Be Too Many THINK HAVING MORE high-performing employees on the same team is better? Think again. Bringing two star candidates into a team actually could lead to both of them underperforming, ac- cording to Paolo Aversa of the Cass Business School in the U.K., Gino Cattani of New York University's Stern Business School in New York City, and Alessandro Marino of Luiss University in Rome. They came to this paradoxical conclusion by studying every racecar driver in Formula 1 races between 1981 and 2010. The group found that, yes, great past performance often led to great future performance among Formula 1 drivers. However, when two top drivers competed on the same team, the closer in level their past performances were, the worse those drivers performed. One reason for this is that the team may dedicate too many resources to the two stars; another is that the drivers might focus too much on competing with each other. In Formu- la 1 racing, this can lead to one or both drivers crashing. "This is a phenomenon that affects top managers at public and private organizations, leading scientists in R&D teams, and movie stars in Hollywood," says Aversa. "Organizations that attempt to establish the perfect team by hiring a portfolio of stars risk putting two roosters in the same henhouse," which can erode performance as a result. If managers must bring in two stars, the authors recommend that they make their strategy and expectations clear from day one. In that way, managers can keep both individuals focused on the team's objective instead of on each other. "Why do high status employees underperform? A study on conflicting status within Formula 1 racing " was presented at the Strategic Management Society Conference in Madrid last September.