Organizational Generativity, Social Media and the Co-creation of Nonprofit Services: A Sociomateriality Perspective

Abstract

This paper presents the relationship between organizational generativity, nonprofits' use of social media, and the co-creation of nonprofit services. While anchoring to the sociomaterialism perspective, we analyze social media interactions of nonprofits by identifying social media affordances and symbolic expressions. To explain the hypothesized relationships, we conduct a survey of nonprofits using social media to co-create services. We applied structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques to generate measurement models and test our hypotheses. Our findings indicate that organizational generativity is positively related to social media affordances for nonprofits, the symbolic expressions of social media to nonprofits and service co-creation. We generally observe that organizations have to build the capacity to operate in new ways as a means of exploring the opportunities and possibilities offered by social media as well as leveraging social media interactions for service co-creation.