The impact of enterprise social media usage on employee creativity: a self-regulation perspective

Organizations have widely adopted enterprise social media (ESM) to improve employees' creativity. This study applies self-regulation theory to explore the role of feedback seeking in mediating the effects of work-oriented and social-oriented ESM usage on employee creativity.

A questionnaire was conducted on 219 working professionals in China – professionals that use ESM in respective organizations.

Results show that both work-oriented and social-oriented ESM usage are positively associated with employee feedback inquiry and, subsequently, increased employee creativity. The findings also suggest that social-oriented ESM usage is positively related to employee monitoring, whereas employee feedback monitoring is not related to employee creativity.

Practitioners and/or managers need to pay greater attention to the impact of work-oriented and social-oriented ESM usage on employee feedback seeking strategies and creativity. The low response rate is one of the limitations in this study, although the results of the test suggest that non-response bias is not a critical issue in this study.

This study contributes to the knowledge of feedback inquiry in explaining the effect of work-oriented and social-oriented ESM usage on employee creativity. The current study helps to extend the intervening mechanism in the relationship between ESM usage and employee creativity.