The associations between employee social networking behavior, work values, individual values and quality of work life in heavy industry companies in Turkey

Values are of people and they teach us what is wrong or what is right from moral and cultural perspectives and they strongly influence our attitudes and behaviors both in our work lives and in private lives. They shed light on how individuals exhibit right behavior through attitudes under different circumstances. This is related to so-called cognitive hierarchy, which refers to influence of basic personal and work values on behavior. The basic value hierarchy differs during an individual life cycle, while some values are very important at one stage of the life cycle, they may become less important in another stage. During this individual life cycle, individuals may gain new behaviors that are more coherent with their values and life quality. Political, economic and technological developments, notably in the field of communication, have led to emergence of a novel concept called "social networking". It has already started to influence the ways in which both employees and organizations are being experienced to determine the quality of their work life. Further, it has also become a highly effective and significant apparatus in understanding the means of not just individual values but also work values. The purpose of this study is to examine the certain individual and work values that determine employee-networking behavior in selected heavy industry sectors in the Turkish business world; namely, iron & steel and petroleum sectors.