Creativity afforded by enterprise social media: a communication visibility perspective

Purpose Due to the rapid growth of digital economy, improving employees’ creativity is becoming essential to optimizing the development of organizations. This study investigates how enterprise social media can enhance employee creativity and develops an integrated model based on communication visibility and social capital theories. Design/methodology/approach A two-stage questionnaire was conducted on full-time employees with enterprise social media experience. The first round of this study distributed 1,048 questionnaires and collected 639 valid sample data. A month later, the second survey was sent to the first valid respondents, with 421 valid sample data collected within a week. Findings Results show that visibility has a positive influence on employee creativity, in which expertise recognition and network recognition play a mediating role. The findings also indicate that bridging social capital positively moderates the effect of visibility on expertise recognition, and bonding social capital positively moderates the effect of visibility on network recognition. Originality/value This study contributes to a better understanding of the benefits of enterprise social media by uncovering the mechanism and theoretical boundary of the effect of visibility on employee creativity.