Impact of Employee'S Social Media Use on Organizational Commitment, Well-Being and Brand Advocates: A Theoretical Contribution

Abstract

The "technological explosion" of social media has brought the substantial development of "new information and communication technologies (ICT), leveraging innovation in the workplace settings and organizations' competitiveness" (Sakka & Ahammad, 2020). Social media has induced several essential changes at the workplace and strengthened organizational stakeholders' relationships into new dimensions. Moreover, employees and organizations extensively use social media for work-related and personal purposes. Furthermore, social media help employees to communicate reliable and authentic information, which could positively affect the brand and organization's reputation. Prior studies have found that social media use generally concerned with various dimensions of employee's well-being, especially online work-related communication and relevant organizational outcomes such as commitment and performance. Yet, we have less understanding about whether work and social media use have beneficial or detrimental effects on employee well-being. The importance of social media and the possible benefits in terms of organizational outcomes such as employees as brand ambassadorship received considerable attention. Moreover, existing studies have not deliberately examined as turning employees into brand ambassadors because employees are considered internal aspects of branding. Prior studies on brand ambassadorship or advocacy have primarily focused on consumer motivations and their different dimensions, and it is mainly grounded on consumer or marketer perspectives. Employee favourable communication or recommendation about a brand on social media platforms is still not well examined. Thus, there is a need to study how work and social related social media use affect employee commitment and well-being. Hence, the present study proposes a conceptual model that examines how work and social related social media use affect employee commitment and well-being and employees as brand ambassadors.