Investigating visibility affordance, knowledge transfer and employee agility performance. A study of enterprise social media

Abstract

The research analyzes the associations between enterprise social media (ESM) visibility affordance (i.e., message transparency and network translucence) and employee agility performance through knowledge transfer (knowledge acquisition and knowledge provision) in organizations that have applied ESM. Utilizing the communication visibility theory, this study further examines the moderating role of task interdependence in strengthening the interactions between knowledge transfer and employee agility performance. We conducted two studies, one in China (347 samples) and the other in the United States (335 samples) to cross-culturally test our research model. Our results indicate that message transparency and network translucence have significant positive associations with employee agility performance in both studies. The findings also show that knowledge provision mediates the relationships between ESM visibility affordance and employee agility performance in both samples, while knowledge acquisition mediates the association between ESM visibility affordance and employee agility performance in the Chinese sample but not in the U.S. sample. Further, task interdependence moderates the link between knowledge acquisition and employee agility performance in China and the United States. However, task interdependence moderates the relationship between knowledge provision and employee agility performance in China but not in the United States. The implications for theory and management are also discussed.