Work and affective outcomes of social media use at work: a daily-survey study

Abstract

Despite the wide use of social media in the workplace, only limited research has addressed how social media use at work would influence employees’ work and affective outcomes. Building upon the self-regulatory perspective, the current study proposes that social media use at work will induce interruptions and procrastination, which in turn will reduce employees’ work engagement; individuals then will show the feeling of guilt because of decreased work engagement. This study examines the proposed theoretical model with an experience sample methodology (ESM), moving beyond predominant between-person designs in the social media use literature. 155 full-time employees were recruited and asked to report their daily experiences for ten consecutive workdays, finally resulting in 1165 data points at the within-person level. Results showed that daily social media use at work exerted a negative indirect effect on work engagement via procrastination, and it also had a positive indirect effect on guilt via interruption and procrastination. This study helps to elucidate the underlying mechanisms between social media use at work and employee outcomes, as well as enriching the literature by examining guilt as the psychological cost of using social media in the workplace.

Keywords:

• Social media use
• procrastination
• interruption
• guilt
• work engagement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data supporting the findings of this study are available in Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/v328b/

Notes

1 To address the potential inflated Type I error rate, we also applied the Bonferroni correction for significance. The results with corrected p-values did not change in a meaningful way, and, therefore, we present results with uncorrected p-values.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 72102140; 72002060) and Shanghai Pujiang Program (21PJC057).