Supporting participatory innovation during the COVID-19 pandemic: a comparative study of enterprise social media use

Abstract

PurposeThe need for accelerating innovation is exacerbated as organizations struggle to either adapt or perish in this unforgiving condition due to the COVID-19 disruption. To address this issue, many organizations have embraced employee-driven participatory innovation to survive and thrive albeit the uncertainties. This study aims to investigate the role of enterprise social media (ESM) in supporting and facilitating these efforts.Design/methodology/approachThis study first identified the underlying mechanisms that allow ESM use to foster and maintain participatory innovation and then reexamined how these mechanisms played out during the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. The data was collected through a questionnaire in two phases, before and during work-from-home mandates, and the results were analyzed and compared to capture similarities and differences.FindingsThe results revealed that innovation culture and management support mediated the effects of ESM use on three measures of innovation productivity in both conditions. Interestingly, the effect of ESM use was more prominent in driving innovation in the work-from-home condition. This effect was not limited to the direct effect of ESM use on innovation productivity but on innovation culture and management support as well.Originality/valueThe results suggest that ESM offer a potentially useful path to support and enable employees to participate in the innovation processes, especially when they work remotely or in a distributed team. More generally, this paper should be of interest to researchers and practitioners interested in understanding, implementing and evaluating enterprise social software applications and encouraging employee-driven participatory innovation.

Does enterprise social media use in the post-acceptance stage improve employee autonomy? An information processing perspective

“…Third, prior literature also demonstrated that ESM offers many features that facilitate the function affordances for innovation-related actions (Karahanna et al, 2018). For instance, ESM provides a set of features for content-creation and content-sharing, enabling employees' ideation action that fosters innovative actions (Abhari et al, 2022;Nivedhitha and Manzoor, 2002). We thus propose that employees innovatively use ESM to help them cope with the uncertainty in the hybrid working practices, such as boundarylessness, multitasking and interruptions at work (Xie et al, 2019).…”

“…, 2018). For instance, ESM provides a set of features for content-creation and content-sharing, enabling employees' ideation action that fosters innovative actions (Abhari et al. , 2022; Nivedhitha and Manzoor, 2002).…”

“…Second, prior studies have demonstrated that organizations commonly use ESM to support business routines (e.g. communication and information sharing) (Mantymaki and Riemer, 2016;Abhari et al, 2022). Moreover, since January 21, 2020, when the USA announced the first case of COVID-19, the pandemic has had persistent transmission around the world (CDC, 2020).…”

“…During this period, employees have transitioned to work-from-home and their daily interactions and work participation have been entirely supported or augmented by digital platforms (e.g. ESM) for most normal work processes (Abhari et al, 2022). That is, ESM has been used routinely as a new normal in the current hybrid working context.…”

“…Second, prior studies have demonstrated that organizations commonly use ESM to support business routines (e.g. communication and information sharing) (Mantymaki and Riemer, 2016; Abhari et al. , 2022).…”