Share, like, twitter, and connect: Ecological momentary assessment to examine the relationship between non-work social media use at work and work engagement

ABSTRACT

Non-work social media use at work has seen a dramatic increase in the last decade and is commonly deemed counterproductive work behaviour. However, we examined whether it may also serve as a micro-break and improve work engagement. We used ecological momentary assessment across 1 working day with up to 10 hourly measurements in 334 white-collar workers to measure non-work social media use and work engagement, resulting in 2235 hourly measurements. Multilevel modelling demonstrated that non-work social media use was associated with lower levels of work engagement between persons. Within persons, non-work social media use was also associated with lower concurrent work engagement. However, non-work social media use was related to higher levels of work engagement 1 hour later. While more extensive non-work social media use at work was generally associated with lower work engagement, our advanced study design revealed that the longer employees used social media for non-work purposes during 1 working hour, the more work engaged they were in the subsequent working hour, suggesting that employees turn to social media when energy levels are low and/or when they (temporarily) lose interest in their work. This behaviour may serve as a break, which in turn increases work engagement later during the day.

KEYWORDS:

• Recovery
• work engagement
• ecological momentary assessment
• micro-break
• within-person fluctuations

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr Chu-Hsiang (Daisy) Chang for her helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. The authors also thank their students Nadine Bruhn, Julia Dietz, Ia Enukidze, Kirsten Dorothea Fey, Viola Geißel, Nora Kischhöfer, Annette Knoblauch, Gregor Matheis, and Finja Sonntag for assisting them in collecting the data for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Christine J. Syrek http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1668-8845

Jessica De Bloom http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2359-0587