Does enterprise social media usage make the employee more productive? A meta-analysis

In recent years, with the ability to facilitate knowledge sharing, information exchange, and work collaboration, enterprise social media (ESM) has been widely embraced by business leaders to improve job performance. However, with the deepening of empirical research and practice, ESM usage has also been found to yield various negative outcomes, such as information overload, privacy invasion, turnover intention, and work-life conflict. Ultimately, these negative outcomes will be reflected in a decline in job performance. Given this inconsistent result, this study presents a meta-analysis of the relations between ESM usage and job performance as described in previous empirical literature. The results indicate that there is a significant positive correlation between ESM usage and job performance, subject to several moderators. Specifically, different types of job performance have a moderating effect on the relations between ESM usage and job performance, and the effect of innovation performance and agility performance is greater than that of in-role performance. Samples with a high proportion of females showed stronger effects of ESM usage on job performance, whereas samples with a high proportion of managers showed stronger effects. Moreover, samples from developed countries showed higher effects of ESM usage on job performance than those from developing countries. These findings hold several implications for related theoretical research and business management practices.