Disclosing the bright side of SNs in the workplace

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to document that employees’ use of social networks (SNs) does not necessarily bring negative consequences and can indirectly benefit organizations and second, to compare the roles of public SNs and enterprise social networks (ESNs) in bringing benefits to organizations. Consequently, this study, on the basis of stimulus‒organism‒response theory, directly investigated and compared the roles of public SNs and ESNs in promoting employees’ organizational commitment from affective, normative, and continuance dimensions with regard to the mediating role of job satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach: For this purpose, 240 employees of Asia-Tech Company, one of the high-speed internet service providers in Iran, who had joined Skype for Business ESN, were included in this study. Partial least squares (PLS) method was used to examine the validity of the measurement and structural models. To this end, Warp-PLS software (version 5.0) was employed. Findings: The results of the study suggested that public SNs have a positive impact on affective and normative commitment; however, no significant impact was observed for continuance commitment. ESNs directly affect none of the dimensions of organizational commitment. Although both types of SNs have impacts on job satisfaction, the greater impact was found for the public SNs. Job satisfaction also has a positive effect on all three dimensions of organizational commitment. Originality/value: To the best of authors’ knowledge, no study has directly investigated and compared the roles of ESNs and public SNs in promoting organizational commitment from affective, continuance and normative dimensions with regard to the mediating role of job satisfaction. The most important theoretical contribution of the present research was to document that the employees’ use of SNs does not necessarily entail the waste of resources and has various advantages, such as strengthening organizational commitment (in affective, normative and continuance dimensions) and job satisfaction. In fact, this study disclosed the bright side of SNs in the workplace.