The Impacts of Social Media on Job Satisfaction: Task-Oriented Use and Relationship-Oriented Use

Abstract

Employees are increasingly using social media in the workplace, and the literature has shown that social media use in the workplace can generate various positive outcomes such as enhanced performance. Because employees can use social media with different approaches, it is essential to understand how different types of social media use generate workplace outcomes and why employees engage in different types of social media use. In this study, we develop a model illustrating how employees’ perceived values of social media are related to their use of social media, which in turn affects their job satisfaction. We identify three types of perceived values in the workplace: utilitarian, hedonic, and social. We categorize the use of social media into task-oriented social media use and relationship-oriented use. We conducted surveys to collect data from American and Chinese employees who use social media in workplace. Our results show that the effects of task and relationship-oriented social media use were stronger for Chinese employees. In addition, utilitarian and social value are both positively related to task-oriented social media use, whereas hedonic and social value are both positively related to relationship-oriented social media use. Theoretically, our study expands the literature on social media use in the workplace through clarifying how different types of social media use are supported by various types of perceived values and by uncovering the role of culture in the process of social media use in the workplace. Practically, our study delivers insights for companies into how to support different types of social media use and how to enhance job satisfaction in the workplace.

Keywords:

• Social media use
• task-oriented use
• relationship-oriented use
• job satisfaction
• perceived value
• culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 CAO, X. & YU, L. 2019. Exploring the influence of excessive social media use at work: A three-dimension usage perspective. International Journal of Information Management, 46, 83–92. also includes hedonic use. However, hedonic use does not deal with social media relating to work-related purposes. Specifically, hedonic use refers to using social media to relate and escape and focuses on personal entertainment. Therefore, our study does not include hedonic use.

2 When there was more than one value, the larger values are reported in Table 3.

3 We thank one reviewer for this helpful feedback.

4 Except for this study, all other studies used a survey.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xuequn Wang

Xuequn Wang is a Senior Lecturer in Edith Cowan University. His research interests include social media, privacy, e-commerce, and human-computer interaction. His research has appeared in MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Journal, Information & Management, Communications of the ACM, and ACM Transactions, among others.

Xiaolin Lin

Xiaolin Lin is an assistant professor of management information systems in the college of business at California State University Sacramento. His research focuses on IT use, human-AI interaction and cyber security. He has published papers in journals such as Journal of Business Ethics and European journal of Information Systems.

Amanda Gonzales

Amanda Gonzales is a graduate student of business administration at West Texas A&M University. She received her undergraduate degree cum laude in applied arts and sciences, with a concentration in business law and ethics, from West Texas A&M University. Her interests include social media law and ethnic disparities in business.