The moderating role of enterprise social media functionalities on employees’ social-related use during work time

Bridging the gap between work‐ and nonwork‐related knowledge contributions on enterprise social media: The role of the employee–employer relationship

“…Another study has found that it can distract employees from their work tasks and reduce employee collaboration and performance (Zhang et al, 2023). Yet other researchers have found that posting on nonwork-related ESM channels can stimulate employee curiosity (Neeley & Leonardi, 2018) and that under some conditions, it can boost employee work performance (Lu et al, 2015).…”

“…Thus some researchers argue that the nonwork-related use of ESM can increase gossip at work (Leonardi et al, 2013), disrupt work flow (Gibbs et al, 2015), and even tarnish employees' reputations because of the excessive socialisation that it provokes (Neeley & Leonardi, 2018). The claim that it causes information overload (Chen & Wei, 2019) and the claim that it leads to reduced employee collaboration (Zhang et al, 2023) are among other frequently cited negative criticisms of the use of ESM for nonwork-related purposes. Despite these criticisms, ESM offers employees new ways to express who they are as people in communications that transcend the work domain (Estell et al, 2021;Leonardi & Vaast, 2017).…”

“…However, although researchers have examined the coexistence of these two types of interactions on ESM, they have arrived at very different conclusions about how nonwork-related interactions affect the work domain. On the one hand, there are studies that highlight the negative impact of nonwork-related interactions, stressing that they can disrupt work (Gibbs et al, 2015), cause a symbolic divide between the work and the nonwork domain (Treem, Dailey, Pierce, & Leonardi, 2015), increase perceptions of overload (Chen & Wei, 2019), and reduce employee performance (Zhang et al, 2023). On the other hand, there are studies that highlight the benefits of nonwork-related interactions on ESM, stressing that they can trigger employee curiosity about work-related content (Neeley & Leonardi, 2018) and increase the readership of work-related posts (Huang et al, 2015).…”