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The diversity of why: a meta-analytical study of usage motivation in enterprise social networks

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Abstract

In times of demographic change, skill shortage and disruptive innovations, organizational knowledge management and innovative capacity are the key to a company’s success. But how can knowledge be retained with fast staff turnover, global project-based work and parental leaves? Using enterprise social media to improve knowledge dissemination at work seems promising, when looking at the success of private social networking sites. In this article we combine ten different empirical studies which investigated different aspects of how user diversity influences the motivation to use social media at work. The emerging meta-study using the DerSimonian–Laird method (total sample size \(N=522\)) analyzes different aspects of user diversity and their correlation with eight motives for SNS usage: information, importance, contact, self-presentation, autonomy, social comparison, and power and control. We found that that the individual achievement motivation correlates positively with the motives importance, power, information and self-presentation. The need for autonomy correlates with openness to new experiences and the need for social comparison with gender and neuroticism. From our findings, we derive practical implications for designing a social networking site for work which fulfills the users’ needs and functions along their motivation.

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Notes

  1. “iNec—Innovation through expert communities in the time of demographic change.”

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Acknowledgements

This research has been funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the European Social Fund (ESF) within the program “Innovationsfähigkeit im demografischen Wandel” under the Reference Number 01HH11045. The authors thank the German Research Council DFG for the friendly support of the research in the excellence cluster “Integrative Production Technology in High Wage Countries.” We would like to thank all participants in our studies for participation. Furthermore, we want to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive and helpful feedback.

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    André Calero Valdez, Juliana Brell, Anne Kathrin Schaar & Martina Ziefle

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Calero Valdez, A., Brell, J., Schaar, A.K. et al. The diversity of why: a meta-analytical study of usage motivation in enterprise social networks. Univ Access Inf Soc 17, 549–566 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-017-0561-9

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