Enhancing employee creativity with enterprise social media: a psychological insights approach

Abstract

Enterprise social media (ESM) represents an emerging technological tool that may assist employees in navigating workplace uncertainties. The present study investigates the relationship between ESM affordances and individual creativity, framed within the context of affordance theory. The research develops a model that elucidates how four key ESM affordances—visibility, association, editability, and persistence—affect creativity through three psychological conditions: psychological meaningfulness, availability, and safety. Utilizing primary data collected from 391 participants (226 male, 165 female) who engage with ESM in their professional environments. Specifically, the outcomes illustrated that visibility and association affordance are positively connected to psychological meaningfulness and availability, but have no relation with psychological safety. Affordance of Persistence is significantly related to psychological safety, and has an insignificant relation with psychological meaningfulness, and availability. Affordance of editability is significantly related to psychological meaningfulness, meaningfulness, availability, and psychological safety. Furthermore, results indicate that psychological meaningfulness, availability, and psychological safety have a significant influence on worker creativity. The current study advances the prior ESM literature by exploring the causes and implications of employee psychological states in the contexts of ESM and creativity.