Abstract:

Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) have already been widely adopted by large, distributed multinational organizations, and are predicted to be adopted by more than 90% of the Fortune 500 companies. Do ESNs actually live up to the hypes about enhancing knowledge management and innovation? Even though emerging studies on technological affordance have explored the “why” of using ESN and presented multiple reasoning schema of the enabling and inhibiting factors for the initial adoption and successful implementation of ESNs for workgroups, much less is understood about the “so what” or the consequences of using ESNs. This review attempts to answer this question by (1) borrowing from initial evidence about organization-wide outcomes of ESNs as well as the “dark sides” of using public social networking sites (SNS) in both personal and work lives, and (2) building upon innovation-facilitative information sharing mechanisms elaborated in transactive memory (TM) theory, thereby to illuminate our understanding on both the enabling and inhibiting consequences of ESNs for workgroup innovation.