Intra-Organizational Social Media and Employee Idea Generation: Analysis based on the Spanning-Relevance Framework

Abstract

Intra-organizational social media platforms are expected to help build a flexible corporate stage that facilitates employees’ communication and leverages creative idea generation. However, whether and how these systems can expedite the creativity of employees remains unclear. This paper attempts to address the impacts of employees’ social relationships on intra-organizational social media on their idea generation quantity and quality. Drawn upon the extant literature in the fields of information systems and organizational behavior, a theoretical model is postulated on the basis of analyzing the attributes of social ties and exchanged information content in light of a two-dimensional framework that juxtaposes boundary spanning and work relevance. The model is empirically tested using data obtained from two internal application systems of a large telecommunications company. Test results validate that employees’ online social relationships with different attributes are discriminably associated with their group identification and proactive creativity. Meanwhile, proactive creativity and group identification both show the positive impacts on idea generation quantity, whereas only proactive creativity has a significant positive impact on idea generation quality. These findings contribute to the literature on intra-organizational social media and employee idea generation, by uncovering the links among employees’ online social relationships, mental processes, and idea generation.

Keywords

Intra-organizational social media / online social relationship / idea generation / group identification / proactive creativity

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