Exploring The Mechanisms For The Effects Of Enterprise Social Media Using Strategies On The Formation Of Employee's Online First Impression

With the emerging of enterprise social media within organization,organizational network and teams are significantly characterized by transparent and virtual,which has made the formation of employees' first impression migrate from offline to online and depend on the cues of actors' online interpersonal interaction.Based on their rich affordance,the rich affordance technology characteristics of ESM provide employees with a new stage where they can carry on use ESM proactively and strategically to run their online impression.Based on this realistic background,information system researchers have expanded the research perspective of impression management form offline to online as well and also have put great efforts on exploring strategic online impression management behaviors and their according outcomes on impression formation.Initially,this paper conducted a systematic literature review towards this stream of papers and four significant literature gaps were discerned:(1)the research logic of previous literatures is not completed especially from the process of onlien impression management perspective;(2)previous research failed to effectively expand online impression management tactics especially with considerating that the technological features of ESM can support users to use them strategically;(3)the papers focused on online impression management strategy usually concentrated on the content strategy(e.g.Share what?),whereas they neglected the prominent role of the way how the contents are shared based on the technological characteristics of ESM(e.g.How to share?);(4)researchers did not pay sufficient attention to explore the mechanisms of the outcome of conducting online impression management strategy.In order to fill above research gaps,this paper put up with a research framework of online impression management strategy with considering two ESM using strategies perspectives:impression management focusing on shared content(e.g.self-verification and self-promotion)and information directedness(publicness and directedness)focusing on shared way at the same time.As a result,an interactive framework of strategic online impression management strategy was constructed and four specific strategic online impression management strategies were extracted:open self-verification,directed self-verification,open self-promotion and directed self-promotion.Furthermore,the paper defined the research situation at employees'onilne first impression formation and held the belief that attribution theory can be a good theory to open the black box between ESM using strategy and the first impression formation and put up with a theoretical framework:"ESM using strategies(e.g.impression management and information directedness strategies)-the attribution of observers(e.g.disapositional and interpersonal attribution)-first impression(e.g.respect and liking)".This paper adopted an experimental research method and simulated four kinds of strategic online impression management behavior,all of which were further corrected and optimized through enterprise field research.At last,four types of research questionnaires were designed and they were dilivered to enterprise workers with the help of Wenjuanxing.Various analysis methods were adopted to examine the hypotheses including variance analysis based on SPSS 16.0,confirmative factor analysis,structural model equation analysis and bootstrap analysis all based on AMOS 24.0 with 420 valid samples.The main research conclusions and findings are as following:(1)There are significant interaction effects on interpersonal and disapoisitional attribution between those two ESM using strategies:impression management and information directedness;(2)among those four impression management strategies,compared with the open self-verification,the directed self-verification can bring higher interpersonal attribution and lower disapositional attribution significantly;compared with the open self-promotion,the directed self-promotion can bring higher interpersonal attribution and lowwer disapositional attribution significantly as well;however,compared with the open self-promotion,the open self-verification fails to bring more interpersonal attribution significantly,but lower disapositional attribution;meanwhile,compared with the directed self-promotion,the directed self-verification can bring higher interpersonal attribution significantly,but no difference on disapositional attribution;(3)Different attribution ways will influence first impression evaluation significantly and differently.To be more specific,interpersonal attribution will contribute higher respect and like significantly and disapositional attribution can lead to lower respect and like significantly on the contrary;(4)Interpersonal attribution has more prominent mediation role between the paths from ESM using strategies to first impression compared with disapositional attribution.Based the formulation towards above realistic and theorectical background and discerning literature gaps,this paper further conducted a summary towards main research conclusions and findings.The management and theory enlightments were further formulated as well.The limitations in research design and implementation were analyzed as well and accordingly future research on the role of ESM using strategies on online impression management was discussed.