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

Abstract

As the popularity of enterprise social media (ESM) increases in organizations, recent studies have shown that ESM may be excessively used at work, triggering negative consequences for employees and organizations. Drawing on uses and gratifications theory (UGT), we propose a theoretical model to test how the communication visibility-message transparency and network translucence-enabled by ESM affects employees' excessive use of ESM at work by satisfying their different needs (i.e., social, content, and hedonic needs); the gratifications of these needs are reflected through employees' perceived values, including perceived social, information, and hedonic values. We analyzed a valid sample consisted of 301 Chinese employees using ESM through smart-PLS to verify the model. The data analysis results indicate that both message transparency and network translucence are positively correlated with employees' perceived social, information, and hedonic values. Perceived social value and perceived information value exert positive influences on excessive ESM use by employees, whereas perceived hedonic value has no significant effect on employees' excessive use of ESM. The findings also show that the relationship between ESM communication visibility affordance and employees' excessive ESM use is fully mediated by their perceived social value and perceived information value. These findings enrich the existing research on ESM and excessive use behavior and help inspire organizations to guide and manage the use of ESM by employees.

Investigating the factors of enterprise social media strain: The role of enterprise social media’s visibility as a moderator

“…These findings reflect that, to obtain a high perception of information, social, and hedonic value, employees are likely to share information, ideas, and interactions on the ESM platform with colleagues. Previous studies also reported similar results [ 12 , 24 , 87 ]. For example, Cao and Yu [ 12 ] reported that excessive use of ESM has a significant effect on strain.…”

“…Uses and gratifications theory (UGT) provides a useful framework for understanding why individuals use and choose a certain type of technology [ 23 , 24 ]. The basic assumption of UGT is that people are not automatically attracted to media content but instead utilize media to satisfy their different hedonic, emotional, and psychological needs [ 25 ].…”

“…UGT has been commonly used to describe CMC media use in a wide range of contexts, such as online gaming [ 27 ], internet services [ 28 ], and email [ 29 ]. In recent technology, scholars have also applied UGT to social media technology such as Facebook, WeChat, Twitter, and Weibo [ 24 , 30 ]. For example, Gan and Li [ 30 ] investigated three types of gratification that would encourage people to continue using WeChat: hedonic, social, and utilitarian.…”

“…“Hedonic ESM usage” applies to the use of ESM technology primarily for entrainment and pleasure [ 12 ]. “Perceived hedonic value” signifies the satisfaction and happiness that results from the ESM content and the connections thereby established with other individuals [ 24 ]. To realize hedonic value, employees may experience satisfaction, enthusiasm, tweets, and excitement with coworkers [ 23 , 47 ].…”

A review of enterprise social media: visualization of landscape and evolution

“…Interestingly, Pitafi et al (2020) found that ESM usage has negative effect on task conflict and have insignificant effect relationship conflicts. Moreover, the social value and information value perceived by employee positive influences on excessive ESM use by employees (Sun et al, 2020a), and both work-related and social-related ESM use are found to be associated with employees' information overload and social overload. Chen and Wei (2019) found an inverted U-shaped relationship between work-related ESM use and overload (both information overload and social overload), and a U-shaped relationship is found between social-related ESM use and overload (both information overload and social overload).…”