Modelling employees’ social networking behaviours on enterprise social media: the influence of enterprise social media visibility

Enterprise Social Media (ESM) is thought to provide new capabilities for employees to establish and manage relationships with co-workers. However, little is known about how employees use these new capabilities, thus leading to performance variation. Drawing on a rich dataset from an ESM platform built in a Chinese high-tech company, this paper uses Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to examine how employees build their social networks on ESM platforms with the visibility affordance of ESM. The results reveal that (1) employees’ networking behaviours on ESM platforms are limited by formal organisational boundaries such as department and hierarchical positions, and they tend to reproduce their working structures rather than to build new ties across horizontal and vertical boundaries enabled by ESM; (2) employees’ networking behaviours are more likely to be influenced by their positions in formal hierarchy than by their informal hierarchies derived from their interactions on ESM; and (3) employees use ESM to reinforce their natural networking tendencies, including preferential attachment, closure and homophily. These findings extend our understandings of employees’ social networking behaviours on ESM platforms and provide insights for managers to make better decisions on the design and implementation of ESM thus to achieve the expected benefits.