Employee agility and enterprise social media: The Role of IT proficiency and work expertise

Highlights

• This study investigates how enterprise social media (ESM) usage in the workplace improves employee agility.

• ESM usage is positively related to employee agility.

• Work expertise positively moderates the relationship between ESM usage and employee agility.

• This study highlights the usage of ESM in the workplace.

Abstract

Enterprise social media (ESM) is an emerging technology that is widely adopted by organizations as a digital platform for facilitating employee communication. However, very few studies explore ESM, and those that examine the technology show mixed findings about the outcomes of ESM in organizations. This study addresses this issue by investigating how ESM usage in organizations is related to employee agility. Two-wave research data are collected from 306 employees in different Chinese organizations that employ ESM in the workplace. Drawing on information processing theory, we propose the moderating role of information technology (IT) proficiency and work expertise in the relationship between ESM usage and employee agility. Findings confirm the positive relationship between ESM usage and employee agility, and work expertise strengthens the positive relationship between ESM usage and employee agility. However, IT proficiency is not a significant moderator in this study. Furthermore, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Introduction

Enterprise social media (ESM), as an open public platform built on technological and ideological foundations of Web 2.0, has increasingly penetrated the workplace, where individuals communicate, interact, and exchange ideas, information, and knowledge with one another [1]. ESM tools, such as DingTalk, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Trello, and Yammer, are widely adopted by companies to support employee communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing [2]. ESM technology comprises several distinct characteristics that differentiate it from other collaborative technologies. For instance, employees can view others’ communications and share information in a highly facilitated way. The benefits of ESM in the workplace have encouraged researchers to study the impact of ESM on employee outcomes [[3], [4], [5]], such as employee agility, which is referred to as the adeptness of employees to respond and adjust to sudden environmental changes (Alavi, Abd. Wahab, Muhamad, & Arbab Shirani, 2014; [4]. Employee agility is a newly introduced concept that is studied little in academic research. For instance, Bala et al. [3] examined the influence of ESM usage on the work agility and communication agility of employees in an organization [5]. investigated the effect of workplace conflicts on employee agility, and Cai et al. [4] discussed the role of psychological conditions in improving employee agility in organizations. Moreover, Forsythe [6] described agile employees as highly flexible, fast, and effective in collaborations. This present study attempts to explore ESM as an important antecedent of employee agility while considering the moderating role of employee work expertise and information technology (IT) proficiency.

ESM is believed to provide precise, appropriate, and efficient information on the activities of coworkers in an organization [7]. However, research on ESM usage and employee agility is limited and presents mixed findings on the impact of ESM in organizations [8,9]. On the one hand, several scholars argue that ESM usage is beneficial for employees in reacting to unpredictable changes, as it enhances learning and knowledge sharing [10,11]. On the other hand, others believe that ESM harms employee efficiency in identifying and responding to market changes, as ESM could lead to the misuse of Internet access [12,13]. In the presence of such mixed findings, investigating the relationship between ESM usage and employee outcomes, such as employee agility, is relevant and important.

The development of ESM technology has reshaped work-related communications. Most existing research [14] on ESM associates it with employee and organization positive outcomes. Such studies emphasize the need to examine factors that can influence the relationship between ESM and its outcomes. These factors can help better understand conditions when ESM leads to benefits for organization and employees. Thus, we assume that ESM usage is helpful when individuals have the ability to utilize ESM features appropriately. For instance, Pitafi, Kanwal, Ali, Khan, and Ameen [15] suggested the moderating role of employee abilities in the effects of ESM usage at work. The implementation of ESM at the workplace is not a costly investment for companies. However, employees' lack of knowledge and proficiency in the usage of ESM can restrict organizations' adoption of ESM. Past research provides limited considerations in this domain. We believe that in the ESM context, employee abilities, such as IT proficiency and work expertise, are important conditions that can moderate the relationship between ESM usage and employee agility such that the relationship is strong for employees with high IT proficiency and substantial work expertise. IT proficiency is referred to as employees’ perceived degree of expertise in using and implementing IT tools efficiently for business applications [16]. An employee with IT proficiency is expected to use ESM technology efficiently, as ESM is an IT-based computer application. Moreover, work expertise may help employees better utilize ESM at the workplace, specifically to avoid the negative impact of ESM.

IT proficiency can assist employees in collaboration and effective communication as well as in responding to queries and obtaining useful information via IT [17]. In ESM technology, owing to the nature of information distribution, mass information is generated but may also cause interruptions. For example, recent studies show that mass information on ESM platforms may cause information overload stress [13,18] and strain [12,19] among employees. Work expertise is another factor that can help employees adopt new technologies smoothly and effectively [9,20]. Individuals with work expertise possess highly accurate, timely, and useful business information [21,22] which facilitates their work performance. Our assumptions are consistent with information processing theory, which describes the cognitive process of human information processing [23]. Information processing theory describes the cognitive process through which individuals organize, gather, process, and interpret new information and make decisions [24]. We assume that employees can better cognitively process information obtained from ESM technology using their work expertise and IT proficiency, which may subsequently enhance their agility in an organization.

Therefore, the purpose of our research is twofold: (i) to explore the relationship between ESM usage and employee agility, thereby determining the employee related outcomes of ESM in the workplace, and (ii) to investigate the moderating role of employee IT proficiency and work expertise in the relationship between ESM usage and employee agility. These objectives will help us identify conditions when ESM is associated with positive outcomes in organizations. Our study makes substantial contributions to the ESM and employee agility literature in several ways. First, our study investigates ESM usage by employees as an important determinant of their agility in an organization. As employee agility is a recent concept introduced in organization research, investigating its predictors should be considered as an important contribution. The existing literature focuses mainly on organizational agility. Nonetheless, past studies on organizational agility notice consistently that employee agility is an important element of organizational agility [25]. Second, our study investigates the role of work expertise and IT proficiency as a boundary condition in the positive relationship between ESM usage and employee agility. We assume that the positive relationship between ESM usage and employee agility is weak for employees with low work expertise and IT proficiency. Thus, our study highlights the role of individuals’ skills in addition to the positive benefits that ESM technology can bring to organizations. Fig. 1 shows the theoretical model of our study.