The Role of Transparency and Privacy in Creative Dialogues on Enterprise Social Media

As organizations have gone digital, communication has become transparent. New physical spaces, communication protocols, and collaboration technologies have made group communication “naked” for everyone. However, this transparency has become controversial. Some have argued that transparency increases knowledge sharing and accelerates organizational learning. While others have suggested that it is not group transparency but rather the opposite, group privacy, that creates opportunities for idea incubation, safe experimentation, and risk-taking, all of which benefit creativity.

A similar debate exists over the structure of a group’s social relationships. According to one perspective, cohesive networks with many dense connections are advantageous for collaboration to the extent that these help to establish trust, norms of reciprocity, and shared identity. But according to an alternative perspective, hole-structured networks are advantageous since these provide access to diverse perspectives and heterogeneous resources.

So, we ask the following questions: Is transparency or privacy good for creativity? Do cohesive network structures lead to more innovation?

To answer these questions, we looked at data from 109 transparent and 106 private groups, in a multinational product design firm, as well as their interactions through Enterprise Social Media (ESM).

ESM are particularly revealing because it allows users to create either transparent or private groups, hence, the researchers could study both in the same organization. Since ESM are internal networking tools, they provide direct opportunities to measure the network structure of different groups and their role in creative dialogues.

Using the theory of productive dialogues, we distinguished between expansion-focused creative dialogues—which involve combining existing ideas in new ways or expanding them to meet new situations, and reframing-focused creative dialogues—which involve the creative destruction of existing concepts to produce novel views of an object or problem.

We used natural language processing and machine learning techniques to assess group creativity. Our findings show that transparent groups characterized by structural holes, lead to expansion-focused creative dialogues because they allow the groups to establish brokerage ties to others outside the group. In contrast, private groups characterized by network cohesion, lead to reframing-focused creative dialogues—the dialectical disruption of concepts.

Providing even stronger support, our findings reveal that if the opposite occurs—private groups with structural holes or transparent groups with strong network cohesion—creativity is hindered.

From a theoretical perspective, our work helps resolve the two controversies in the creativity literature. Contrary to popular beliefs, transparency and diversity aren’t the only paths to innovation. Only once a group knows whether a creative task involves expansion or reframing, can they navigate the tradeoffs, design the group structures, and choose the right privacy settings to produce the desired form of creative dialogues.

It is thus important to critically reflect on contemporary and practical attempts that aim to maximize transparency, whether through digital technologies, like ESM, or physical design, such as open floor plans and glass meeting rooms.

Considering the accelerated rate of digital transformation experienced by organizations today, understanding how best to organize digital groups and workplaces with the aim of enhancing creativity is more relevant than ever!