HOW WHATSAPP CHANGES THE WAY BUSINESS WORK?

Using a focus group and a pre-test, this study validates a scale for measuring the motivations, uses and gratifications for WhatsApp, which comprises of dimensions: Communication, privacy, credibility, and miscellaneous activities. Workplace WhatsApp usage motivations consists of two dimensions namely, working, planning, and coordination and speed, convenience, and practicality. After the focus group and the pre-test, 455 participants were included in a survey to understand a connection between work performance and WhatsApp usage. The results were discussed in terms of uses and gratifications.


INTRODUCTION
"Work productivity in an organization is a measure of how well and organized an organization member spends their time to complete daily tasks" (Seman, 2014. p. 31). According to Diercksen et al. (2013b), blocking social network sites is not a solution to increase employee efficient use of work time, because employees will spend their time to find a solution to this banning. They recommend that the best solution comes from announcing and implementing guidelines on social media in the workplace offer the best solution. This is because, employees can understand easily and adjust their social media use accordingly, if it is displayed to them what is acceptable and not acceptable in the workplace.
"WhatsApp sends real-time messages and is one of the world's most popular communication applications in the 21 st century" (Ahada and Lima, 2014. p. 189). In recent years, WhatssApp reseach has gain popularity. For example, WhatsApp's educational value that encourage interaction (Andujar, 2016), for teaching and learning, positive perception and acceptance of the use of WhatsApp (So, 2016) are among them.
However, those studies on WhatsApp didn't base on investigating its communicational tool and value among employees. The academic literature lacks this kind of information. In other words, those studies investigating social media's effect on workplace productivity, neither examined the effects of WhatsApp nor looked at the phenomenon from the Uses and Gratifications (U and G) perspectives to understand varying degrees of its effects in their studies.
Therefore, the purpose of this current study is investigating how employees use WhatsApp during their working hours and how their WhatsApp usage effect their working performance (whether a negative or positive).
In this study, we have investigated whether employees make use of WhatsApp for work purposes and if that usage is related with their work performance. Based on the abovementioned literature review, in this paper, we have formulated the following hypotheses: performance, and (f) respondents' workplace productivity has a positive effect on work performance.

Uses and Gratifications (U and G) and Motives to Use WhatsApp
Uses and gratifications theory analyzes the use of mass media and explains why people use certain media outlets (Dainton and Zelley, 2011). Uses and gratifications research tries to explain why particular media channels are selected over others (e.g., YouTube instead of TV channel). Uses and gratifications theory is considered an effective theory for identifying media needs (Heggde and Shainesh, 2018). The main difference between previous media studies and the uses and gratifications studies' audiences are considered as active instead of passive (Austin and Jin, 2018). Ishii et al. (2017) researched technology-driven gratifications gathered by the use of text-messaging. They found that gratifications were positively related to text-messaging. Punyanunt-Carter et al. (2017) findings showed that the relation existed between participants' entertainment and functional needs with Snapchat. Gan and Li (2018) developed motivations for WeChat, which are: hedonic gratification, social gratification, utilitarian gratification and technology gratification.
Although the closest social media to WhatsApp are Snapchat (e.g., Punyanunt-Carter et al., 2017) and WeChat (e.g., Gan and Li, 2018), less attention has been paid to how gratifications affect the use of WhatsApp. These studies have identified various needs for social media, yet primarily among American users and primarily on college students. The main contributions of the current study are that (1) it specifically identifies various needs for WhatsApp, (2) it examines its usage among employees, and (3) its investigation is primarily among users with different cultures.
Based on focus group research results and pilot study results the additional hypotheses were employed: H 2 : WhatsApp usage motivations of (a) Communication, (b) privacy, (c) credibility, (d) and miscellaneous activities have a favorable effect on work performance.
H 3 : Workplace WhatsApp usage motivations of (a) working, planning, and coordination, (b) speed, convenience, and practicality have a favorable effect on work performance.

Pilot Study
The pilot study (see Appendix A) included 23 participants of whom 13 of them were academician and 10 of them were office workers. 15 participants answered questions in their native language and 8 participants answered in English. They were asked two open ended questions and they wanted to list as much uses and gratifications as possible by considering their daily uses of WhatsApp. Pilot study questions can be found in the appendix.

Focus Group
We applied focus group (see Appendix B). The duration of interview was 41 min and the discussion was voice recorded. The interviews were in Turkish and once it was completed the voice recordings were translated into English. The focus group consisted of 10 participants who are university students. Students were registered to summer school and got credit for their participation. The interview was semi-structured and 18 open ended questions (they are in the appendix) were asked to the participants.
In the category of workplace WhatsApp usage motivations, two group of motivations were discovered, namely: (1) Working, Planning, and Coordination, and (2) Speed, Convenience, and Practicality.
Thirty five WhatsApp motivations scale were in the form of a 5 point Likert scale (1-5 strongly DA-strongly A); twenty threeitem workplace WhatsApp motivations scale and six item work performance scale were in the form of a 5 point Likert scale (1-5 strongly DA-strongly A) questions too.

Semantic Differential Questions
Some social media attitudinal questions were gathered from Diercksen et al. (2013 a) study. They were in the form of "yesno questions" which were modified and turned into 7-point semantic differential to get more detail about participants' answers.

Dependent and Independent Variables
Independent variables used in this study are WhatsApp usage motivations. Dependent variable is Academic staff productivity.

Analysis
Survey method was used to gather information, and the data were analyzed using the SPSS 22 software. 259 of them didn't take place and participate to the study. The total number for participation is 455.

Reliability
Cronbach alpha of this study can be seen on the following Table 1.

Factor Analysis Results
For examining the factorability of the thirty-five WhatsApp usage motivations Scale items two criteria were used. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was 0.92, above the commonly recommended value of 0.6 and Bartlett's test of sphericity was significant (Chi-square (595) = 9250.562, P = 0.000). Eigen values showed that the first factor explained a total of 36.28% of the variance.
Initial Eigen values indicated that the first four factors explained 36.2%, 7.1%, 5.3%, and 4.5% of the variance respectively.
Maximum likelihood factor analysis was conducted and the factors were examined using oblimin rotations of the factor loading matrix. The four factor solution, which explained 53.1% of the variance, was preferred, because (1) there was the "flattening out" of Eigen values on the scree plot after four factors, and (2) the insufficient number of primary loadings appeared and caused difficulty of interpreting the fifth factor and subsequent factors.
A total of three items were eliminated because (1) they did not contribute to a simple factor structure and (2) they failed to meet the criteria of having a factor loading of 0.4 or above. All items in this analysis had primary loadings over 0.4 (Table 2).
For examining the factorability of the twenty-three WhatsApp usage motivations at workplace Scale items two criteria were used. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was 0.95 and Bartlett's test of sphericity was significant (Chi-square (253) = 12508.823, P = 0.000). Eigen values showed that the first factor explained a total of 64% of the variance.
Maximum likelihood factor analysis was conducted and the factors were examined using oblimin rotations of the factor loading matrix. The two factor solution, which explained 72.1% of the variance. All items in this analysis had primary loadings over 0.8 (Table 3).

Regression Analysis Results
There is a significant relation between work performance and WhatsApp's contribution to positive two-way communication in the workplace (β = 0.159, P ≤ 0.05) (R 2 = 0.025). Hypothesis 1a was confirmed.
There isn't significant relation between work performance and WhatsApp's improvement of employee-employer communication in the workplace (β = 0.060, P ≤ 0.05) (R 2 = 0.004). Hypothesis 1b was not confirmed.
There is a significant relation between work performance and WhatsApp's improvement of employee-employee communication in the workplace (β= 0.116, P ≤ 0.05) (R 2 = 0.014). Hypothesis 1c was confirmed.

CONCLUSIONS
In this research, we have studied the use of WhatsApp among the employees in North Cyprus. This study aims to explain WhatsApp usage and its contribution to work performance and various WhatsApp activities. Except WhatsApp's improvement of employee-employer interaction, other variables were significant. WhatsApp's contribution to positive two way communication in the workplace increased work performance. WhatsApp's improvement of employee-employee communication at workplace stimulated work performance. WhatsApp's contribution to work efficiently boosted work performance. Additionally, WhatsApp's improvement of workplace productivity promoted work performance.
As a result of this study, we have found four motivations for WhatsApp usage, namely communication, privacy, credibility, and miscellaneous activities, and other two motivations for WhatsApp workplace usage, namely "working, planning, and coordination" and "speed, convenience, and practicality." Significant relation was found between WhatsApp's privacy motivation and work performance. Their opinions that WhatsApp is a private place may have increased favorable attitude toward WhatsApp usage and this in turn increased their work performance.    Drawing on a new perspective of uses and gratifications theory, this study makes theoretical contributions related to WhatsApp usage at workplace and the findings have managerial implications for WhatsApp and workplace productivity.
There is a positive relation between work performance and WhatsApp's speed, convenience and practicality. The more they used WhatsApp for work purposes, its speed, convenience and practicality affected their work performance in a positive way.

Instruction
There are two questions below and those will give basis to our academic study. Your responses will be used only for academic purposes and therefore, you do not need to write your name and your sincere responses are elicited.

Questions
Will you please list your answers in detail about WhatsApp usage benefits by considering both your daily WhasApp usage and its usage in workplace environment. Will you please write as much reason as possible for below answer-1 and answer-2?
ANSWER-1: The benefits and reasons of WhatsApp usage for OUT-OF-WORK: ____________ ANSWER-2: The benefits and reasons of WhatsApp usage for WORKPLACE: ______________ Thank you for your participation.