Enterprise Social Media and Control System Design
- Enterprise social media has been found to be a curse and a blessing at the same time. ESM has been reported to lead to unproductive ‘games of visibility’ and ‘exhibitionism’, while it has been also found to enable productive outcomes related to knowledge work and product innovation, the latter being the main reason for its wide-spread adoption. We argue that decisions to use ESM as a control instrument are not made in isolation, but as part of a set of complementary choices. We provide arguments and empirical evidence that the use of ESM as a control instrument in organizations complements the use of subjective evaluations of non-task related performance (SPE). We also show that firms that face high ESM employee concerns, have a stronger complementarity between ESM use and SPE. Additional analyses show that ESM use and performance-based pay (PBP) are also complements. Together the results imply that management control system configuration changes with the employment of ESM.