Work and affective outcomes of social media use at work: a daily-survey study

Despite the wide use of social media in the workplace, only limited research has addressed how social media use at work would influence employees’ work and affective outcomes. Building upon the self-regulatory perspective, the current study proposes that social media use at work will induce interruptions and procrastination, which in turn will reduce employees’ work engagement; individuals then will show the feeling of guilt because of decreased work engagement. This study examines the proposed theoretical model with an experience sample methodology (ESM), moving beyond predominant between-person designs in the social media use literature. 155 full-time employees were recruited and asked to report their daily experiences for ten consecutive workdays, finally resulting in 1165 data points at the within-person level. Results showed that daily social media use at work exerted a negative indirect effect on work engagement via procrastination, and it also had a positive indirect effect on guilt via interruption and procrastination. This study helps to elucidate the underlying mechanisms between social media use at work and employee outcomes, as well as enriching the literature by examining guilt as the psychological cost of using social media in the workplace.