The Effect of Employee Participation in Enterprise Social Media on Their Job Performance

Abstract

This study focuses on employee involvement in enterprise social media (ESM) and the impact of ESM on job performance. Few studies found empirical support for this perspective due to limited sample size either the difficulty of accessing the data on user behavior in ESM and their job performance. We addressed this research gap through a data-sharing agreement with a large, high-tech manufacturing enterprise with internal social media and conducted a cooperative study on the impact of employee behaviors involved in ESM on their job performance. We divided online activities on ESM into information-sharing behaviors, information-seeking behaviors and general usage behaviors and then employed hierarchical regression analysis to investigate how the various usage behaviors of employees on ESM affect their job performance significantly. We find that information-seeking behaviors on ESM have positive effects on job performance, but information-sharing behaviors on ESM have negative effects on job performance. Overall, the usage of social media within enterprise social media use could help improve employee job performance. Moreover, to test whether the timing of ESM usage (during working hours or off-work hours) may affect employee job performance, we add a variety of moderator variables into the model. The results show that information-sharing behaviors, information-seeking behaviors and general usage behaviors during working hours negatively moderate the relationship between ESM usage and job performance. The findings have valuable managerial implications for the use of ESM.INDEX TERMS Enterprise social media, information sharing, information seeking, job performance.

Improving Employee Agility Using Enterprise Social Media and Digital Fluency: Moderated Mediation Model

“…Companies use the ESM platform for the communication and collaboration of their employees, which include Jive, Chatter, DingTalk, Slack, IBM Connections, and Yammer. ESM usage by companies has a core trend for business activities [22], [28]. For instance, the allure of these emerging technologies is an increased capability to promote the communication and collaboration of employees within enterprises [26], [29], [30].…”

“…These ESM-related functionalities will only be useful if users have the ability to properly explore and use ESM functionalities. Previous surveys have given limited consideration to individual capacities with associated ESM usage [22]- [24]. This shortcoming has encouraged us to investigate the role of digital fluency in the ESM technology.…”

Understanding the Emergence of Collaborative Problem-Solving Practices in Enterprise Social Media: The Roles of Social Factors

“…Although previous researchers pointed out its nature of the community of practice, extant empirical studies focused on individuals' reported behavior rather than actual practices in ESM sites [27,28]. No studies considered actual and workrelated practices and their enablers in ESM communities.…”

“…Leonardi and his colleagues termed the new phenomenon enterprise social media (ESM) and found that ESM can promote emergent practices of knowledge collaboration by increasing the visibility of the network and content [16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Against this background, ESM is expected to become an active place for CPS through establishing a virtual community of practice within organizations [23][24][25][26][27][28]. How CPS emerges in ESM communities becomes an open question.…”

“…Recently, many ESM studies investigated the enablers of ESM usage for knowledge sharing. However, the existing literature mainly used a survey method to examine employees' self-reported factors and behaviors related to knowledge [27,28]. Instead, our study focuses on actual knowledge-related practices in virtual groups enabled by ESM communities.…”