Talking engagement into being: A three-wave panel study linking boundary management preferences, work communication on social media, and employee engagement

Widespread use of social media across work and non-work boundaries has heightened concerns about employee engagement in the contemporary workforce. This study examines how employees’ boundary management preferences influence their work communication on social media, and how these factors impact their engagement. Results from three waves of survey data (N = 361) demonstrate that work communication mediates the relationship between employee boundary preferences and engagement, supporting the hypothesized causal structure over alternative models. Overall, the findings contribute a novel perspective on employee engagement by showing that mediated work communication plays a central role in constructing engagement, rather than merely demonstrating it. We discuss how organizations can leverage this knowledge to address critical concerns about workplace (dis)engagement in the digital age

Understanding work-related social media use: An extension of theory of planned behavior.

This study examines the motives of employees to engage in work related social media use - i.e. the use of personal social media accounts to communicate about work-related issues. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) was used to explain this behavior. Because social media can enable users to express their identities, social identity expressiveness and self-identity expressiveness were added to the TPB model. Through an online questionnaire, using purposive sampling technique, 514 Dutch employees were asked about their social media use and motivation to do so. We used structural equation modelling (SEM) to test our hypotheses. Results indicate that these identity constructs enhance the predictive ability of the TPB. As such, workrelation social media use is likely to take place spontaneously rather than deliberately and consciously planned