Effects of enterprise social media usage on task performance through perceived task structure: the moderating role of perceived team diversity

Abstract

PurposeOrganisations have widely adopted enterprise social media (ESM) to improve employees' task performance. This study aims to explore the mediating role of perceived task structure on the relationship between ESM usage and employee task performance. The authors investigate the moderating effects of perceived team diversity on the relationship between ESM usage and perceived task structure.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a questionnaire survey in China on 251 working professionals who use social media in their respective organisations.FindingsResults showed that employees' perception of task structure considerably mediates the relationship between ESM usage and task performance. Findings also confirmed that perceived team diversity negatively affects the relationship between ESM usage and perceived task interdependence.Research limitations/implicationsPractitioners and/or managers should pay attention to the effect of ESM usage on employee's perceived task structure. Furthermore, they should focus on the level of team diversity when adopting ESM to enhance task performance.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the knowledge of perceived task structure in explaining the effect of ESM usage on task performance based on communication visibility theory. This work presents the relationship among ESM usage, perceived task structure, perceived team diversity and task performance. Moreover, this research enriches the literature on ESM usage by investigating the moderating roles of perceived team diversity whilst presenting the negative effects of perceived team diversity.

Excessive Enterprise Social Media Use Behavior at Work: Role of Communication Visibility and Perspective of Uses and Gratifications Theory

“…In recent years, more and more companies have introduced ESM internally, and the use of ESM at work has become more commonplace. Prior studies have demonstrated that the rational use of ESM can help facilitate employees' knowledge sharing [38][39][40][41], improve their work performance [3,42], and support them to build and maintain their social capital [43][44][45][46]. However, the in-depth application of ESM within organizations demands employees to use ESM extensively in their work.…”

“…Therefore, adopting the concept of affordance will help us clarify why, when, and how ESM affects individual behavior [17,18]. An important affordance enabled by ESM is communication visibility, which describes the unique visibility capabilities brought by new media technologies, such as ESM [22,42,62]. The communication visibility of ESM means that communication among employees in the workplace can be visible to a wider organizational audience [22,62,63].…”

A review of enterprise social media: visualization of landscape and evolution

“…Specifically, the structural and cognitive dimensions positively affect job performance, whereas the relational dimension shows a negative influence. Moreover, employees' perception of task structure was found to considerably mediate the positive relationship between ESM usage and task performance (Deng et al, 2020). Cheng et al (2020) found that work engagement acts as a mediator in the positive relationship between ESM usage and employee innovative performance.…”

The impact of enterprise social media use on employee performance: a grounded theory approach

“…Only by doing this we can profitably explore the effect of ESM use on employee behavior and enterprise output and provide references for enterprise decision-making. Most studies investigating the purpose and dimensions of social media usage in enterprises have generally been focused on the single aspect of ESM use, and their results have shown that ESM use can contribute to task and creative performance (Ng et al , 2016; Deng et al , 2020; Sun et al , 2020a, b), organizational socialization (Leidner et al ,2018), network formation and boundary spanning (Oschand Steinfield, 2018) and team and organizational performance (Archer-Brown and Kietzmann, 2018; Cao et al , 2020). Enterprise social network use has been studied as well, and it has been found that enterprise social network use can contribute to knowledge management (Mäntymäkiand Kai, 2016; Hacker et al , 2017).…”