The Motives for enterprise social network usage and its effect on employee job performance

Abstract

Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) have brought revolutionary changes to business organizations as they offer enormous potential to enhance collaboration, interaction, innovation, and efficiency. However, despite of these benefits many organizations have failed to encourage its employees to actively engage with ESN, making their investment decisions questionable. Therefore, in order to drive employees to use ESN more, it is important to examine what motivate employees to use ESN. Prior literature indicated that the findings were not conclusive in relation to the gratifications/motivations driving the employees to use ESN at work and the effect of ESN use on employee job performance. Therefore, this study focused on examining the motivations to use ESN and the effect of ESN use on employee job performance in terms of both in-role and innovative job performance. A comprehensive literature review was conducted to identify the gratifications motivating the employees to use ESN. Identification of gratifications for this study was primarily based on the Uses and Gratification theory. Accordingly, information sharing, self-documentation, information seeking, entertainment and social interaction were identified as the gratifications driving the employees to use ESN at work. Based on the literature review, a conceptual framework was developed depicting the relationships between gratifications, ESN use, and employee job performance. This framework led to the development of nine hypotheses. Data were collected from employees in the software industry who use ESN at work, through an online survey-based structured questionnaire. The unit of analysis of the study was individual respondents and data were collected from 146 respondents. The results revealed that amongst the five gratifications examined in this study, information sharing, self-documentation and social interaction have positive and significant effects on ESN use. It was also confirmed that ESN use has positive and significant effects on aggregate employee job performance as well as on both in-role and innovative job performance. The findings of the study have both theoretical and practical implications. Because the studies examining the gratifications driving ESN use are scarce, the present study helps to fill the existing knowledge gap in this context. This is especially important in the Sri Lankan context. Further, the study could reveal five gratifications which were cited most by the previous researchers. The finding that ESN use has a positive and significant effect on employee job performance is important from an organizational perspective since they can motivate the employees to use ESN more as it results in better performance of them. Further, the findings can be used by organizations to justify the investments they make on ESN as it translates into better employee job performance.