The Impact of Technology Support for Contextualization and Media System Dependency on Enterprise Social Media Use

While enterprise social media (ESM) increasingly plays a vital role in improving teamwork in organizations, our understanding of how ESM is used by team members is still limited. Although researchers have investigated the impacts of ESM use, relatively few studies explore how individual members exhibit different extents of ESM usage behavior. Drawing upon media system dependency theory, we propose that ESM support for cognitive and affective contextualization can enhance individuals’ different types of dependency relations with the ESM by fulfilling their needs, which in turn lead to their different extents of usage behavior. Firms in China where ESM applications are used regularly will be surveyed to verify the associated hypotheses. The research design and expected contributions of this research will be discussed.