Employees' Problematic Behavior of Using Enterprise Social Media: Role of Visibility Affordance and Perspective of Uses and Gratifications Theory

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

“…Besides, by reviewing and summarizing the relevant studies on antecedents of excessive use behavior of social media (as shown in Table 2), we found that existing studies mainly focus on individual characteristics and demand factors to explore the antecedents of excessive use behavior. However, as a significant influencing factor that affects users' usage behavior, the effect of technical factors on excessive use behavior has not been explored [7,13]. Therefore, we adopt the concept of affordance that takes into account both technical factors and personal factors to predict the excessive ESM use behavior of employees to address this research gap.…”

“…With the continuous development of information technology (IT), social media has gradually penetrated all areas of human social life, such as people's daily life [1], education [2], and work [3]. More and more companies are aware of the development potential that social media brings to the workplace and are committed to deploying enterprise social media (ESM) internally to improve the current working environment by promoting communication and collaboration within organizations [4][5][6][7]. Based on the research of Leonardi, et al [4], ESM is defined as the "webbased platforms that allow workers to (1) communicate messages with specific coworkers or broadcast messages to everyone in the organization; (2) explicitly indicate or implicitly reveal particular coworkers as communication partners; (3) post, edit, and sort text and files linked to themselves or others; and (4) view the messages, connections, text, and files communicated, posted, edited and sorted by anyone else in the organization at any time of their choosing.…”

“…Current research mainly focuses on how users' characteristics or demand factors affect their excessive use of ESM whereas ignoring the possible impact of technological factors [7]. Zheng and Lee [13] call for an examination of the relationships between the social media technological factors and excessive use, which they believe will help to understand the impact of these factors and their negative consequences.…”

“…Our study introduces the uses and gratifications theory (UGT) to explain how communication visibility affects employees' excessive use behavior for ESM. This theory is often used by researchers to explain why and how users use certain media [7,25]. Advocates of the UGT believe that the reason users use a certain technology or media is to gratify their motivations or needs, and once these motivations or needs are satisfied, they will tend to regain the same experience [7,26,27].…”

“…Communication visibility of ESM provides a unique capability for highly visible communication that supports social cohesion, social networking, and knowledge sharing [20], which provides the potential to gratify the different needs of employees. Besides, according to the UGT, the gratification of needs will in turn affect their usage behavior [7,30]. Alksasbeh, et al [31] indicated that when social media meets the needs of student users, it might further increase their frequency of using the media.…”