The Impact Of Enterprise Social Networking Use On Team Performance

With the development of Web2.0, Internet-based social networking is becoming increasingly popular, and affecting our life and work. Up to December2014, the number of Chinese netizens had reached649million. There are three types of social networking applications, including instant messaging, social networking and microblogging, and their coverage rate has reached89.3%,61.7%and43.6%respectively. As our life is influenced by social networking so deeply, it’s application is becoming more common at work. Enterprise social networking (ESN) is the application of social networking techniques for employees to share information within the organization, which make the communication efficient, transparent and convenient among employees. However, there is so little research about the influence of enterprise social networking, and it is not clear how enterprise social networking use affect team performance.Based on the theory of transactive memory system (TMS), this paper mainly study the mechanism how ESN use affect team performance. First, this paper reviews the current literature about ENS and TMS, and finds the gap between ESN and team performance. Second, this paper divides ESN use into task-oriented and relationship-oriented use, and analyzes the three dimensions of TMS, including specialization, credibility and coordination. Then, this paper studies the different impacts about ESN use on TMS, which affect team performance in turn. In the end, this paper proposes a theoretical model, which treats ESN use as independent variable and team performance as dependent variable.We have distributed242questionnaires and received201, and the response rate is83.1%. There are175valid questionnaires, involving46teams. Then we process data using SPSS and Smart PLS tools. There are several steps about how we analyze our date, including date aggregation from individual to team, reliability analysis, validity analysis, correlation analysis and structural equation model analysis. At last, we analyze the mediating role of TMS between ESN use and team performance.The results indicate that task-oriented ENS use positively affect specialization in teams, while relationship-oriented ESN use positively affect credibility and coordination in teams. The three dimensions of TMS positively influence team performance. In addition, we find that specialization and credibility play a partly mediating role between ESN use and team performance, while coordination play a full mediating role between ESN use and team performance. This paper enriches the literature about the influence of ESN use and TMS, makes guidance for enterprise how to use and harness ESN, and have an important significance both in theory and practice.