Pan-Pacific Conference XXXIV. Designing New Business Models in Developing Economies

information (e.g. promotion of fake news) and
misinformation spreading can cause panic and fear in the
population, which can, in turn, become mass hysteria.
This study investigated whether employees in
commercial banks do share any information or videos to
spread false statements in the event of any conflicts.
Despite widespread social anxieties about the impact of
digital technologies on traditional social ties, emerging
findings indicate that social network sites and other
social media have become important sites for cultivating
personal relationships [16]. According to [17], social
media are affecting the way people communicate,
develop relationships and build trust in home and work
settings. While this study was aligned with above
mentioned perspectives of relationships on social media
platforms, it further investigate whether commercial
banks have utilized social media platforms to establish
relationship congruent with business etiquette. There is a
little evidence in the existing literature depicting that
employees in commercial banks have enjoyed the right to
reveal information as a practice of their freedom of
speech. [18] indicate that defenders of freedom of
expression have raised growing concerns over how legal
and regulatory trends might be constraining freedom of
expression at the very time that the Internet has become
more widely recognized as a major medium for fostering
global communication.
[9] contends that social media has become an important
tool of self-expression and self-presentation. Therefore,
this study is linked to the above perspectives as it
investigates whether is there any right to legitimize the
spread of information by employees in the commercial
banks. [13] believe that with regards to personal privacy,
employees who have uploaded their individual profiles
cannot stop their distribution. [19] point out that South
Africa has a sound banking system, healthy contractual
savings institutions, risk-spreading capabilities, high
levels of liquidity and sophisticated financial markets.
This study also investigated how employees in
commercial banks use social media platforms to establish
and enhance relationships.
Measuring Instruments
The main instrument employed in this study was a selfdeveloped
and administered questionnaire [20] which is a
five-point Likert scale structured questionnaire [23]. This
instrument was relevant to guide the study to generate
and collect data from commercial banks’ employees.
Ethical consideration
This study ensured strict confidentiality through
thorough administration of structured questionnaires by
the researcher. Self-administered and developed
structured questionnaires were distributed to a population
size of 194 commercial banks’ employees. In terms of
consent, selection criteria were a pre-requisite for
research subjects, and data was collected after proper
ethical considerations, whereby a researcher obtained
ethical certificate and clearance from the university’s
higher degree committee (HDC) and legitimacy from
commercial banks.
RESEARCH FINDINGS
The following dimension presents the perceptions of
social
media adoption in business etiquette on commercial
banks. Therefore, the data presented was collected and
obtained through a structured questionnaire developed by
the researcher. In this regard, all sub-dimensions were
thoroughly discussed in this study. The high-reliability
score of this study was 0.827, which exceeds the
recommended Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.700. This
indicates a high degree of acceptable, consistent scoring
for the research study. The dimension discussed in this
study is as follows, represented as Table 1:
METHODOLOGY
Research design
This study resides in quantitative research design [20; 21]
whereby a quantitative research approach was undertaken
through adoption of structured questionnaires which were
self-developed and administered by the researcher. A
Likert scale [22] structured questionnaire addressed a
dimension regarding perceptions in business etiquette in
the advent of social media which discussed pertinent subdimensions
concerning an expression of feelings among
employees, employee gossip, distortion of
communication, practice of freedom of speech, spread of
false information and relationship establishment.
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