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The purpose of this study is to answer whether and how supervisor–subordinate instrumental or expressive ties based on enterprise social media (ESM) might enhance employee performance.

Drawing on social exchange theory, this study developed a theoretical model to explore the influencing mechanism of different supervisor–subordinate ties based on ESM on employee job performance. The model was empirically tested through 219 ESM users.

The results revealed that supervisor–subordinate instrumental ties based on ESM play a positive role in employee job performance, while supervisor–subordinate expressive ties based on ESM are not significantly related to employee job performance. Supervisor–subordinate instrumental ties and expressive ties based on ESM can positively influence employee job performance through the mediating effect of organizational trust. Besides, perceived performance climate can weaken the relation of organizational trust to job performance, and then weaken the indirect relations via the mediating of organizational trust.

Our findings advance the understanding of ESM use through various underlying mechanisms and have the potential of guiding organizations to fine-tune their social media usage strategies.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between information overload and employees' workplace anxiety in the context of enterprise social media (ESM).

This study built a theoretical model to analyze the relationships among employees' perceptions of information overload on ESM, supervisor-subordinate instrumental and expressive ties on ESM and workplace anxiety. PLS-SEM was used to test the model through 219 questionnaires collected online.

The results revealed that information overload on ESM plays a positive role in employees' workplace anxiety. Supervisor-subordinate instrumental ties based on ESM can weaken the relationship between information overload and employees' workplace anxiety, but expressive ties can strengthen the positive relationship between information overload and workplace anxiety.

Little is known about whether information overload on ESM will affect employees' workplace anxiety and how leaders can mitigate this effect through ESM. Hence, this study developed a theoretical model and conducted an empirical study to open up a research opportunity to examine the relationships among information overload on ESM, supervisor-subordinate instrumental and expressive ties on ESM and employees' workplace anxiety. The study also has the potential to guide organizations in fine-tuning their social media usage strategies.

Although a significant body of work has amassed that explores the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of employee turnover in organizations, little is known about how employees go about quitting once they have made the decision to leave. That is, after the decision to voluntarily quit their job is made, employees must then navigate through the process of planning for their exit, announcing their resignation, and potentially working at their company for weeks after their plans to resign have been made public. Our lack of understanding of the resignation process is important as how employees quit their jobs has the potential to impact the performance and turnover intentions of other organizational members, as well as to harm or benefit the reputation of the organization, overall. Moreover, voluntary turnover is likely to increase in the coming decades. In this chapter, we unpack the resignation process. Specifically, drawing from the communication literature and prior work on employee socialization, we develop a three-stage model of the resignation process that captures the activities and decisions employees face as they quit their jobs, and how individual differences may influence how they behave in each of these three stages. In doing so, we develop a foundation upon which researchers can begin to build a better understanding of what employees go through after they have decided to quit but before they have exited their organization for the final time.

Organizations use enterprise social media (ESM) platforms to operate, function, and develop. However, the effectiveness of the use of ESM is inconclusive. This study aims to explore the mechanism and boundary conditions of the relationship between employee ESM use and job performance.

This study uses a 2-wave survey design, with a final sample of 481 employees from a large automobile company.

The results indicate that ESM use is beneficial and detrimental to job performance. On the one hand, ESM use is positively related to work overload, decreasing job performance. On the other hand, ESM use is positively associated with informational support, increasing job performance. A mediation test revealed that both work overload and informational support mediate the relationship between ESM use and job performance. Furthermore, job autonomy weakens the positive relationship between ESM use and work overload, but strengthens the positive relationship between ESM use and informational support.

This study provides a more balanced view of how ESM use influences job performance by demonstrating the opposing mediating roles of work overload and informational support. Further, this study fills a research gap by considering job characteristics when examining the boundary conditions of ESM use. Third, this study validates the generalization of the job demands-resources model in social media research.

With the increasing prevalence of social media in everyday life, scholars have argued the need of exploring enterprise social media (ESM) for workplace outcomes. This study investigates the relationship between ESM use and organizational learning capability (OLC) by focusing on the mediating role of informal learning (INFL) and the moderating role of social capital (SC).

The paper developed and tested a mediated moderated model explaining the impact of ESM on OLC. The study used temporally separated data of 281 respondents collected in two waves from firms in India that use organizationally facilitated ESM platforms for internal workplace communication.

An analysis of temporally separated two-wave data indicates that INFL mediates the relationship between ESM use and OLC. Also, SC is found to moderate the effect of ESM use on INFL, and INFL mediated the moderation effect of SC on relationship between ESM use and OLC such that the relationship will be stronger when employees have a higher rather than lower level of SC.

The study theoretically contributes and extends the literature on ESM and learning in organizations. The study provides important practical implications to support and institutionalize learning at work. The results of the study provide evidence that ESM are not just networking tools but a platform for learning. Findings of the study suggest that ESM can be one such tool to promote and capture employee INFL. The results also show that SC plays a critical role in predicting the extent to which employees learn informally using ESM, thereby building OLC. This result suggests that organizations should make conscious and concerted efforts to build employee SC. The above findings also have interesting implications for learning and development (L&D) and information technology (IT) managers who wish to implement technology for collaborative purposes.

Addressing the underlying processes that explain how ESM positively influence OLC was highlighted as a critical research gap that needs attention. The paper is novel in its approach as it provides empirical evidence for the relationship between ESM and its impact on employee outcomes, an area pertinent in today's digital economy, however, received sparse attention by management scholars so far. It also provides empirical grounds toward a meaningful shift in the social media discourse – transition from being traditionally viewed primarily as “a networking platform” to “a learning platform.”

Previous studies of manufacturing management have ignored a critical theme: the relationship between supervisory support and work‐family conflict. This paper aims to explore the link between interpersonal relationships, guanxi, leader‐member exchange (LMX) theory, emotional intelligence (EI), supervisory support, and work‐family conflict.

The unit of analysis of this research is the dyad; the paper gathered 244 valid questionnaires from workers in traditional industries in Taiwan and China. Multiple regression analyses were used to analyze the data and to test the hypotheses.

The paper finds that supervisory support for work‐family conflict has faded in traditional industries. And, it finds that leaders with a higher level of LMX and expressive ties to their subordinates tend to offer a higher level of supervisory support, but that leaders with higher level of instrumental ties to their subordinates tend to offer lower levels of support. Finally, the survey results also show that a leader's level of EI is not related to supervisory support.

The research combines Western concepts of relationships with the Eastern concept of guanxi with the goal of clarifying the transfer of management concepts and exploring the explanatory power of guanxi in Chinese society. Although the empirical results of this study do not totally agree with expectations, they treat the benefits of supervisors' EI for organizations from a new point of view.

This study aims to explore how gender influences the impact of interpersonal trust among subordinates on spontaneous work behaviors such as sharing responsibility and knowledge and engaging in organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). The goal is to understand factors that contribute to the effectiveness of women as supervisors and subordinates in the manufacturing sector.

Data were gathered from 308 subordinates and 71 supervisors working in the manufacturing sector in mainland China using a survey methodology. Descriptive statistics, correlation, confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical moderated regression were the statistical techniques used.

Results indicate that both affect- and cognition-based trust among subordinates positively impact responsibility- and knowledge-sharing behaviors, OCB-individual (OCB-I) and OCB-organization (OCB-O). For female subordinates, the gender of the supervisor alters the relationship between both forms of trust and responsibility-sharing behavior and OCB-O, but not knowledge-sharing behavior and OCB-I. Cognition-based trust plays a dominant role for male subordinates, while affect-based trust is more relevant to female subordinates. Finally, while the gender of the supervisor moderates the impact of both affect- and cognition-based trust, it is significant for female subordinates only.

This study is not without limitations. First, the authors had access to a limited sample of female supervisors and female subordinates, which is not uncommon in the manufacturing sector that is mostly composed of male employees. Second, the cross-sectional nature of the study does not allow the capture of the impact of change in trust over time. However, it is believed that the multi-source design, the novelty of the study’s findings and their implications to interpersonal trust theory and supervisory practice compensate for the limitations. For starters, this study endorses the crucial role of interpersonal trust among employees in predicting important organizational behaviors. It corroborates the conceptual distinction between affect- and cognition-based trust and empirically validates the concepts of affect- and cognition-based trust, RSB, KSB and OCB in China. It uses multi-source data and measures behavioral outcomes of workers as observed by their immediate supervisors. These contributions speak to the empirical viability of our theoretical framework that may be useful to those contemplating cross-cultural research.

The study started with the question, does gender matter. The answer is that it does and that it has implications for human resource management. The gender of both supervisors and subordinates affect the way interpersonal trust among workers elicit desirable organizational behaviors such as sharing responsibilities, sharing knowledge and other forms of citizenship behavior. Female supervisors need to build trust among their female employees before they can expect effective organizational behavior. The story is different for male supervisors and male employees. This has implications in the way male and female supervisors are trained. It also has implications for work group formation and composition. What the study does not know is whether these findings are limited to the manufacturing sector or unique to China. It is recommended that a cross-cultural comparative research be undertaken to address those questions.

In light of the study’s findings, it is proposed that supervisory training and development programs should take into consideration that female supervisors encounter more challenges in eliciting favorable behaviors on the part of female subordinates in a work environment that is male-dominated.

The unique value contribution of the study pertains to the role of gender – the gender of the supervisor and the gender of the subordinate in shaping organizational behavior. Specifically, the authors show that the supervisor’s gender influences the relationship between affect-based trust and RSB, KSB and OCB-O and the relationship between cognition-based trust and OCB-O. Their point is that these relationships are significant only for female supervisors. In addition, they show that gender similarity between the supervisor and the supervised matters, only when both are female. These findings limit the role of interpersonal trust in eliciting favorable organizational behavior across the board and question the portability of interpersonal trust theory across industries and cultures.

The use of social media is an integral part of modern life, yet the impact of social media on creativity is a paradox. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, the authors propose that social media, as an ecological condition, both nurture and deplete resources. Accordingly, the authors investigated two inconsistent mechanisms: creative self-efficacy and ego depletion.

Study 1 established the within-person effects of social media use on creativity by tracking 64 college students for five working days. Using a sample of 493 employee–leader-matched dyads in a national bank, Study 2 tested the entire model. Study 3 is a follow-up experiment based on a sample of 160 participants.

The results consistently showed that: (1) social media use had a positive impact on creativity in general; (2) social media use increased ego depletion and creative self-efficacy, which were two inconsistent mediators; (3) hedonic use of social media reduced the negative impact of cognitive use of social media on ego depletion.

This research sheds new light on the paradox between social media use and creativity and highlights the benefits of the balanced use of social media features. This research has implications for creative stimulation and job design in digital contexts.

This paper aims to explore why some Chinese subordinates will engage in building guanxi with their supervisor while others will not. The authors conceptualize subordinates’ initiative behaviors which aim at building up or improving guanxi with their supervisors through social interactions as supervisor–subordinate guanxi (SSG)-building behaviors. Guided by the theory of planned behavior (TPB), this study examines how three psychological antecedents (guanxi orientation as attitude, individual perception of group-level guanxi practice as subjective norm and person–supervisor [P-S] fit perception as perceived control) independently and interactively predict subordinates’ SSG-building behaviors.

The authors used a sample of 162 supervisor–subordinate dyads from four enterprises located in Southwest China.

Results indicated that P-S fit perception is most strongly related to subordinates’ SSG-building behaviors, followed by guanxi orientation and individual perception of group-level guanxi practice perception. Guanxi orientation is also found to strengthen the positive effect of P-S fit perception on subordinates’ SSG-building behaviors.

The authors’ findings shed light on the psychological mechanisms of Chinese subordinates’ behaviors to build up or improve guanxi with their supervisors, and advance the current understanding of SSG development from a planned behavioral perspective.

This study investigated the crossover of work–family conflict (WFC) from supervisors to subordinates employed in conventional work settings. The authors hypothesized that the supervisor’s WFC would impact the subordinate’s level of WFC, and the level of crossover would vary with relationship quality or LMX.

The authors surveyed a matched set of 150 supervisors and 193 subordinates from several services organizations who were recruited using a snowballing technique. Data were analysed using hierarchical regression analyses and moderation testing.

Results confirmed a significant direct crossover path. Further, the crossover was found to be lowered in the event of higher LMX quality.

The findings provide significant insights into the conditions under which transmission of WFC takes place by broadening crossover research in the work–family area. Future studies must explore the crossover of work–family enrichment and the role of leadership styles, empathy and perspective taking of subordinates in the crossover.

Supervisors must endeavour to reduce the level of WFC of subordinates by trying to build high-quality LMX by regularly interacting with them and by providing them a supportive climate. Employees in turn must support supervisors in various means, which will help them gaining manager’s trust and support.

Examination of the potential mitigating effect of high-quality LMX in the crossover of WFC in supervisor–subordinate dyads has rarely been investigated in the past.