Article Preview
Top1 Introduction
Social media (SM) and social networks (SN) have become popular among persons of all ages (Albayrak & Yildirim, 2015; Balakrishnan, 2014). For this reason, even at a strategic level, businesses are trying to find solutions to guide their employees to use social media in the way that will enhance their work activities. That is why organizations use mainstream, public and personal social media to enhance employee engagement, knowledge sharing, creativity, customer service, marketing and talent recruiting (Song, Wang, Chen, Benitez, & Hu, 2019). It is necessary for companies to create an environment that will enhance the performance of their employees, but also to understand the challenges and opportunities of the changing nature of the today’s workforce in the context of the development of new technologies (Gibbs, MacDonald, & MacKay, 2015). In the modern business era of technology, knowledge sharing and innovation are extensively acknowledged as the critical competitive aspects that can significantly influence and foster the survival, outstanding performance, and adaptation of an employee (Ngai, Tao, & Moon, 2015; Palacios Marqués & José Garrigós Simón, 2006; Sigala & Chalkiti, 2015).
The global expansion of digital technologies in the last two decades has had incredible growth and has created a lot of changes in the business world and everyday lives, as well as raised questions about the digital age opportunities for global development. New technologies have created different opportunities that were previously unavailable to organizations. For their optimum use, it is necessary for companies to embrace exponential changes and trends in technology, and become flexible and adaptive (Collins, Fineman, & Tsuchida, 2017). One of these trends is social media technologies that have created tremendous changes in all spheres of our lives and became the most important and reliable source of information for users and companies (Cheema & Papatla, 2010). In addition to using it for private purposes, social media technologies have brought changes in the business world too, from creating new business and marketing models to “more successful customer behavior, new ways of managing and learning, improving innovation, sharing knowledge, collaboration, and communication” (Aral, Dellarocas, & Godes, 2013).
Many sources claim that social media tools have a positive impact on employee productivity and performance at work (Ali-Hassan, Nevo, & Wade, 2015; Ashraf & Javed, 2015; J. Bennett, Owers, Pitt, & Tucker, 2010; R. Kishokumar, 2016; Moqbel, 2012; Moqbel, Nevo, & Kock, 2013; Nielsen & Razmerita, 2016) while some of them believe that positive aspects also include networking, business process acceleration, customer relations improvement, cost-effective recruitment of quality employees, improvement of morale, motivation and employee satisfaction (Van Zyl, 2009). Similarly, Jafar, Geng, Ahmad, Niu, & Chan (2019) find that use of SM could enhance employees’ job performance through knowledge exchange, while Zivnuska, Carlson, Carlson, Harris, & Harris (2019) argue that balance and burnout mediated the relationship between social media and job performance. At the other side, some studies claim that using social media at the workplace has negative effects that reflect in “productivity decline, data leakage, malware, scams, and so on” (Wilson, 2009) or by inducing technostress that negatively affects job performance (Brooks & Califf, 2017). In other words, it is clear that there is a dilemma in the literature regarding the impact of the use of social media in the workplace on workers’ work performance. Therefore, in this study, we investigate the role and impact of different types of social media use at the workplace on employee's innovative behavior and individual job performance. Based on the literature review, a research model and hypotheses were developed. The research model predicts that social media influence innovative work behavior and consequently individual work performance. This study attempts to resolve the controversy mentioned above and complete the missing knowledge by empirically studying different dimensions of social media in the workplace context.