Could social media help in newcomers' socialization? The moderating effect of newcomers’ utilitarian motivation
Introduction
With the advancement of the Internet, social media has become increasingly popular in people's daily lives and has gradually penetrated the workplace (McAfee, 2006, Roth et al., 2016). Many new employees (newcomers) use social media to understand their organization and accelerate their integration into it. However, no consensus has been reached either theoretically or practically on whether employees are encouraged to use social media at work or whether social media can help employees improve their work performance. Gaudin (2009) found that 54% of companies prohibited employees from using Facebook and Twitter at work. However, research by McKinsey Consulting (2012) showed that social media could improve employees' performance and bring value to companies. Some academic studies have also found that social media improves job satisfaction and work performance (Charoensukmongkol, 2014), but others have described the negative impact of social media. For example, Charoensukmongkol (2016) argued that social media could lead to emotional exhaustion, and Brooks (2015) asserted that social media in the workplace could reduce employees' happiness. These opposite findings have raised questions as to whether social media can facilitate new employees' integration into organizations and under what circumstances social media can play a positive role in the workplace.
To fill these gaps, this study investigates the relationship between social media usage and newcomer socialization, the process through which newcomers acquire the knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attitudes needed to integrate into the organization (Allen et al., 1999, Fisher, 1986, Van Maanen and Schein, 1977). Newcomer socialization is essential to both the organization and its new employees. Rapid and high-quality newcomer socialization can reduce organizational costs and facilitate performance (Hyosun and Hyehyun, 2014, Kang et al., 2017, Wang et al., 2017), and newcomers' rapid socialization can make the organization accept them more readily. Specifically, newcomers can quickly integrate into the organization by building close relationships with its members (Wang & Kim, 2013) and acquiring the knowledge and skills they need to understand their jobs (Wang, Kammeyer-Mueller, Liu, & Li, 2015). If newcomers cannot quickly integrate into an organization, the organization's turnover rates will increase significantly (Kammeyer-Mueller et al., 2013, Takeuchi and Takeuchi, 2009). Research has shown that organizational turnover is often highest among newcomers (Allen, 2006). Thus, it is important to investigate the factors influencing newcomer socialization. With the increasing popularity of social media, increasing numbers of newcomers are relying on this tool to communicate and establish relationships with their colleagues and leaders to achieve rapid socialization. However, the effect of the intensity of social media usage on newcomer socialization has been neglected in the literature. We attempt to fill this gap.
In addition, it is apparent that not all newcomers who use social media are able to quickly integrate into their organizations. Therefore, we also try to find the boundary condition of the effect of the intensity of social media usage on newcomer socialization. Research has indicated that the effect of social media usage on newcomer socialization outcomes is contingent on employee motivation (Hansen & Levin, 2016). Thus, the second purpose of this study is to examine the potential moderating effect of utilitarian motivation on the relationship between the intensity of social media usage and newcomer socialization. “Utilitarian motivation” refers to employees' perception that using social media for work is useful and effective (Leftheriotis & Giannakos, 2014). Therefore, when newcomers believe that using social media helps them acquire knowledge for work and maintain colleague relationships, a higher intensity of social media usage may make it easier for them to integrate into the organization. Conversely, if newcomers perceive that social media does not help them acquire essential work knowledge and maintain colleague relationships, more intense social media usage may not necessarily facilitate newcomer socialization. That is, the effect of the intensity of social media usage on newcomer socialization will be amplified when newcomers’ utilitarian motivation is high.
This study attempts to fill these important gaps in the literature and argues that newcomers' social media usage intensity has a positive effect on their socialization. Furthermore, we propose that utilitarian motivation moderates the relationship between the intensity of social media usage and newcomer socialization. This study contributes to the social media and newcomer socialization literature in three ways. First, by exploring the relationship between the intensity of social media usage and newcomer socialization, this study enriches the research context of social media. Second, this study introduces newcomers’ social media usage intensity to the field of newcomer socialization, providing a new perspective for newcomer socialization research. Finally, this study empirically examines the moderating effect of utilitarian motivation on the intensity of social media usage and newcomer socialization, and reveals the boundary condition of the effect of such intensity on newcomer socialization.
Section snippets
Social media usage in the workplace
Social media is an online tool that enables users to share ideas, communicate, collaborate, and build relationships (Ouirdi, El Ouirdi, Segers, & Henderickx, 2014). In recent years, the intensity of social media usage in the workplace has increased (Huang and Liu, 2017, Robertson and Kee, 2017). To assess the intensity of social media usage, a comprehensive index has been used to measure the frequency and persistence of individuals' social media usage. It has two main aspects: the degree to
Research hypotheses and model
As mentioned earlier, scholars have not reached a consensus on the dimensions of newcomer socialization. However, scholars have widely recognized the dimensions of interpersonal relationships and performance proficiency (Bauer, Bodner, Erdogan, Truxillo, & Tucker, 2007; Chi & Wang, 2016; Liu, Wang, Bamberger, Shi, & Bacharach, 2015; Liu, Zhang, Chen, Guo, & Yu, 2015; Nifadkar & Bauer, 2016; Nifadkar, Tsui, & Ashforth, 2012; Wang, Hom, & Allen, 2017). Research on interpersonal relationships has
Participants and procedure
The current study aims to explore whether newcomers’ social media usage intensity influence their socialization in the context of social media. Therefore, we conducted the study on the WeChat. WeChat is one of the largest and most popular social media used by newcomers to communicate with their colleges and leaders in the workplace in China. According to Tencent financial report on its second quarter and interim results in 2018, WeChat has 1.058 billion monthly active accounts (Tencent, 2018).
Confirmatory factor analyses
We performed confirmatory factor analysis to test the construct validity with Mplus 7.0 before testing our hypotheses. We firstly examined the baseline model, which included all four variables of the intensity of social media usage, utilitarian motivation, performance proficiency and interpersonal relationships. To reduce the number of parameters in the structural equation model and to keep a reasonable degree of freedom in the model (Bandalos, 2002), the item parceling method recommended by
General discussion
Based on the literature, we propose a conceptual model to investigate the relationship between the intensity of social media usage and newcomer socialization. Even more importantly, we identify a boundary condition by introducing social media utilitarian motivation as a moderator. The results provide support for all of the research hypotheses. Specifically, the intensity of social media usage is positively related to performance proficiency (H1) and interpersonal relationships (H2). In
Funding
This study is supported by the Humanity and Social Science Foundation of Ministry of Education (NO. 17YJA630002), National Science Foundation of China (NO. 71902104), Humanity and Social Science Youth Foundation of Ministry of Education (NO. 17YJC630223), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (NO. 2017M612299, 2018M640643).
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Di Cai: Conceptualization, Data curation, Project administration. Jia Liu: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis. Haichuan Zhao: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing, Methodology. Mingyu Li: Writing - original draft, Data curation, Formal analysis.
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