Innovations in Human Resource Management: Impact of Social Media Use on Employees’ Performance

Abstract

Social media has changed the modes of all aspects of business operations, particularly human resource management practices. Firms are increasingly using social media tools to facilitate information sharing among their employees in an attempt to improve the innovation process and firm performance. It is expected that using new information technologies such as social media will enable the firm to act proficiently on business opportunities and reconfigure human resources by utilizing networks to routinize the business's knowledge and innovation competencies. This study aims to examine how different purposes of social media use to influence employees' level of job performance directly or indirectly through job satisfaction as a mediator. Two purposes are identified: work-related purposes and personal purposes. A closed questions survey tool was used to gather the data from the employees of three leading organizations in the Tulkarm district. Two hundred eighty-two valid questionnaires were analyzed using SPSS and IBM SPSS Amos 24. The findings revealed that the impact of using social media for work purposes on job performance is fully mediated by job satisfaction, while social media use for personal purposes does not influence job performance directly nor indirectly. The current study enriches the available literature by examining social media use from two perspectives: work-related and personal purposes, thus added value to the available literature, particularly in the Palestinian context. Practically, managers could benefit from the work by adopting relevant strategies to guide this use in a way that motivate the employees towards achieving the goals of the organizations. Such as offering reliable internet services which may help in encouraging the employees or even attracting the ones who are not engaged yet in social media to start using it for work purposes, as for personal purposes, specific policies can be adopted to monitor this use within controls. The article recommends organizations to utilize and direct social media use for work purposes towards achieving the goals of the organizations. Keywords: communication, job satisfaction, performance, personal purposes, social media.