Enterprise Social Media Use and Employee Creativity: Moderating Role of Innovative Culture

Abstract

As an emerging collaboration platform based on web 2.0 technologies, enterprise social media can provide opportunities and challenges for information acquisition and creativity development. However, existing research on the ways in which enterprise social media use affects employee creativity from both internal and external team perspectives is rather limited. Using communication visibility theory (CVR), this paper proposes a research model for investigating the relationship between enterprise social media (ESM) usage and employee creativity. Drawing on an analysis of 218 employees’ data, this study found that ESM, when used for both work and social purposes, has a positive effect on internal information exchange within teams and external knowledge acquisition across teams, which further contributes to employee creativity. Innovative culture can weaken the relationship between work-related ESM usage and internal team information exchange, and strengthen the relationship between social-related ESM usage and internal team information exchange. The findings suggest means of using enterprise social media for specific purposes to increase creativity and innovation in organizations.