Excessive Use of WeChat at Work Promotes Creativity: The Role of Knowledge Sharing, Psychological Strain.

Huiqin Zhang,Meng Wang,Meng Li,Xudong Chen

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.571338

Huiqin Zhang, Meng Wang + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.571338

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Abstract

The pervasive nature of social media can result in excessive use and addiction, but whether excessive use of social media is good or bad for individuals' creativity is unclear. This study explored the direct and indirect impact of excessive use of WeChat on individuals' creativity in workplace, focusing on how excessive use of WeChat promotes or restrains creativity through knowledge sharing and psychological strain. Based on the person–environment fit model and motivation theory, this study examined the three paths of excessive WeChat use affecting individuals' creativity in workplace. We used the structural equation model to test our research model. A survey of 364 employees revealed that excessive WeChat use directly promotes creativity and indirectly improves creativity via knowledge sharing, but excessive WeChat use does not lead to psychological strain. These findings, obtained by theoretically and empirically investigating the positive outcomes of excessive WeChat use, suggest an upside to excessive WeChat use. The implications and limitations of this study and future research on excessive-use behavior are also discussed.

Highlights

Owing to the rapid development of mobile technology and popularity of smart devices, social media plays an important role in people’s daily lives
We focus on excessive use of WeChat and its impact on individual creativity to determine whether excessive WeChat use promotes or restrains creativity and how it occurs
Based on the criteria suggested by Fornell and Larcker (1981), construct reliability was accessed by determining whether Cronbach α and composite reliability (CR) are >0.7

Summary

Introduction

Owing to the rapid development of mobile technology and popularity of smart devices, social media plays an important role in people’s daily lives. Social media brings a great convenience as people can use it any time for entertainment, communication, and information. Pictures, and comments by interacting with others on social media (Alshahrani and Pennington, 2018). Social media provides great opportunities to communicate and share. Employees use many social media platforms for sharing and communicating (Yu et al, 2018). Many studies have shown that using social media platforms can enhance individual job performance and productivity in the workplace (Aral et al, 2013; Moqbel et al, 2013; Alalwan et al, 2017; Cao and Ali, 2018). Different forms of knowledge sharing on social media can help people develop ideas (Panahi et al, 2016a).

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