Enterprise social media use and overload: A curvilinear relationship

Abstract

Considerable research has focused on the positive effects of information technology use. However, emerging research and practice commentary highlight the importance of considering the negative side of information technology use. The current study investigates how enterprise social media use (i.e. work- and social-related use) influences employees’ perceived overload (i.e. information and social overload), which in turn affects enterprise social media-related strain. In addition, we posit that communication visibility moderates the nonlinear relationship between enterprise social media use and overload. Using a survey of 282 enterprise social media users in the workplace as a basis, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between work-related enterprise social media use and information overload and between work-related enterprise social media use and social overload. Moreover, a U-shaped relationship is found between social-related enterprise social media use and information overload and between social-related enterprise social media use and social overload. Communication visibility positively moderates the inverted U-shaped relationships between work-related enterprise social media use and information overload and between work-related enterprise social media use and social overload, but negatively moderates the U-shaped relationship between social-related enterprise social media use and information overload. The theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.

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

“…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]. At the same time, through communication visibility, employees can learn about the communication contents, or messages, as well as connections, or networks among their coworkers [6,62], which enables them to quickly locate experts in a specific field and identify colleagues with shared interests [63,69].…”

The Sustainable Positive Effects of Enterprise Social Media on Employees: The Visibility and Vicarious Learning Lens

“…While Burt [88] suggests that this advantage comes from "bridging cross structural holes in an organization's communication network," ESM that makes communication visible to third-parties provides all users this visual advantage. By observing the communication happening on ESM, individuals can speculate on the actual experience or knowledge their colleagues possess [93].…”

Enterprise Social Media Adoption: Its Impact on Social Capital in Work and Job Satisfaction

“…It is worth noting that ESM is a social media embedded intra-organization, and is also an office system with nested social elements that affords employees a range of uses that are not simply focused on work, but also on socialization. ESM use can be divided into work-related use and social-related use [5]. Work-related use refers to the extent to which employees use ESM for utilitarian working purpose (i.e., posting an update on a project or exchanging information about organizational objectives), and employees' work-related activities may positively influence their task execution and performance [19].…”

“…Secondly, in terms of the research content, most studies on ESM use regard it as a common behavior construct [7,67]. In fact, ESM is perceived as not being completely mandatory, and the use behavior and effects among employees, groups, or organizations are not always the same [5,44]. In this regard, distinguishing between the two types of usage patterns provides valuable insights into the current research on ESM use, especially as ESM is becoming increasingly important.…”

“…A global survey about social media use in the workplace revealed that 36% of employers block social media at work [4]. While there is some cautionary information about the negative effect of using online social networks at work on productivity [5], more companies have realized that there are benefits [6,7], such as promoting organizational communication, strengthening knowledge management, and enhancing innovation capability [8].…”